Director of photography Lincoln Else descends from a 320-ft tall redwood. Photo: Lincoln Else

Our mission in Mendocino County’s Montgomery Woods was to film a UC Berkeley team of biologists installing a weather station at the very top of a giant coast redwood for a QUEST TV story. The weather station, and 15 others the scientists are installing atop redwoods up and down California, will help them figure out to what degree ancient redwoods can withstand climate change.

For associate producer Josh Cassidy and me, the February trip was the culmination of nearly two months of planning. We had the good fortune of finding a director of photography, Lincoln Else, and a sound engineer, Owen Bissell, with rock-climbing experience. Lots of experience, actually. Lincoln worked for several years as a rock-climbing ranger in Yosemite. Neither he nor Owen had ever climbed a redwood. Who has? But they were both excited to check redwood-climbing off their to-do list of extreme outdoor experiences.

I, on the other hand, was a bit of a wreck.

Not that I’d be climbing the tree myself. I wouldn’t, since I had no climbing experience and no time to get any. But in preparation for the trip, I had done my best to understand how one climbs a giant redwood. You pull your full weight up along a rope for approximately as long as it would take to climb a 30-story building. When you get to the top, you hang from the branches with short ropes. The biologists are very experienced and cautious. But even circus workers have safety nets. These folks don’t.

It also turns out that I know Lincoln’s father. Jon Else was my documentary filmmaking professor at UC Berkeley 14 years ago. A parent’s suffering is not to be taken lightly: I’d make sure nothing happened to his son.

Our crew: Owen Bissell and Lincoln Else. Photo: Josh Cassidy

We drove three hours to Mendocino County and spent the better part of the afternoon filming on the forest floor. The biologists were taking longer than expected to get up into the tree. The afternoon wore on. Then towards the end of the day, the opportunity for the crew to climb arrived. This is what we had been waiting for, but I was torn. I felt Lincoln might be too tired, but unwilling to admit it. I imagined the first paragraph of the news story that would be written if something went wrong: “Exhaustion is believed to have contributed to a climbing accident that left two members of a film crew seriously injured…”

I read somewhere that not even a healthy dose of paranoia can protect you from tragedy. Or as a friend concluded after getting caught in crossfire on an otherwise calm street, in a reasonably calm country: La tenemos prestada. Life is on loan to us.

After a few agonized moments I acquiesced. Lincoln climbed up. He filmed great material of the biologists steering the weather station components through the redwood branches, then hanging boxes and bags at the top like Christmas tree decorations – moments we would have missed if we hadn’t filmed that afternoon. Later in the edit suite, I realized that we needed every bit of video we had filmed.

A few weeks later I emailed Lincoln to ask him to send me some photos he had taken up in the tree. Yes, his recent filming trip to Nepal had gone well, he emailed back. Up until the point where it hadn’t. He had suffered a fractured skull while filming for National Geographic in a cave. A rock had fallen on him in an area where rocks aren’t supposed to fall. He’ll make a full recovery, but the ordeal was harrowing for him and his family.

In the documentary filmmaking business, caution can make for a mediocre career and an unhealthy sense of the path not taken (if only I had gotten that shot!) Luckily, for this story I have no regrets.

Watch Redwoods and Climate Change.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

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It'll be a long time before scientists figure out why this branch is white.
And even longer before the public finds out.

Is there any place to check in for updates on this research?

Timothy Jordan asked this question on Chris Bauer’s blog about figuring out the genetics of redwood albinism. Unfortunately, the answer is that there really isn’t any place to see how the research is going.

This is because science is this weird combination of secrecy and openness. Research projects start out as proprietary but once finished, they become open source.

What this means is that no results will be released until a good chunk of the research is done and it has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. This usually takes a year or more and albino redwoods will probably take even longer.

Part of the reason for this is simple caution on the part of scientists. No one wants to release results so early that that they have to retract them later. Like everyone else, scientists don’t like to be proven wrong in public.

But this only explains not communicating preliminary results. Once a result is pretty solid, it should be OK to broadcast publicly. Except that it still isn’t.

This isn’t the fault of many of the scientists doing the research. I remember wanting to shout my latest results from the mountaintops as soon as I got them. Lots of scientists I have talked to feel the same way.

The problem has more to do with how science is funded. It simply isn’t designed to allow incremental progress to become public.

Scientists rely on the federal government for most of their funding. The NIH, NSF, DOE, and a few other agencies supply the lion’s share of research dollars.

Labs are awarded these grants based on the work they have done. There is absolutely no incentive for sharing their work early. In fact, sharing work too soon can cost you grant money and maybe even (eventually) your lab.

The graveyard of the scientific careers of those scientists who released their data too soon. Photo by Corpse Reviver.

To be credible, scientific results must be published in a peer-reviewed journal. This is the “coin of the realm” in the scientific world. To succeed as a scientist, you need lots of these in the top journals and of course, successful scientists are the ones who get funded.

These journals frown on releasing data before that data can make a big splash for their journal. This forces scientists to not release information to the general public (although they can talk about it at some point at scientific meetings). To keep from perishing, scientists need to keep their results under wraps.

Not only that, but scientists are not above stealing someone’s data and using it to get to the full story first. Smaller labs in particular are vulnerable to this sort of predation. Again, this forces scientists to keep their results to themselves rather than broadcasting it far and wide. Otherwise, they’ll have nothing to show for their work and they won’t get funded.

The only way to overcome these barriers and get results presented to the public in a more timely manner would be to change how science gets funded. Make it so there is lots of money to go around so that scientists will get money whether their lab makes the breakthrough or someone else uses your preliminary results to make the breakthrough.

Of course this won’t happen. For one thing, you wouldn’t be able to screen out the bad and/or lazy scientists nor reward the true go-getters. And besides, there are already way too many labs chasing way too few grants. Given that our government is sliding into insolvency, it is very unlikely that they will throw any more money at science so the public can get information any sooner.

A new way to fund science also wouldn’t change other aspects that keep our current system in place. For example, many scientists like to get a result first and beat the other guys. No funding tweaks are going to change this competitiveness.

Looks like we’ll have to stick with the current way that science is set up. It has done a great job of explaining our world and how it works. We just need to be patient and wait for the findings to eventually be released. As soon as they are, I’ll update you right here.

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This redwood, in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park near Santa Cruz, might be genetically identical to some of its neighbors. Photo: kqedquest.

QUEST has an inordinate fondness for albino redwoods. It all started with the Science on the SPOT video Albino Redwoods, Ghosts of the Forest. Then there was a radio story, and a few blog posts. And last week QUEST revisited the research in two new Science on the SPOT videos about the ghosts of the forest. The video Revisiting Albino Redwoods, Cracking the Code focuses on QUEST blogger Barry Star and Stanford professor Ghia Euskirchen’s research on how the albinos are genetically different from “normal” coast redwoods. In Revisiting Albino Redwoods, Biological Mystery, Santa Cruz Professor Jarmila Pitterman wonders how albino redwoods’ total lack of chlorophyll affects their physiology and ecology. After producing all these videos, QUEST Producer Chris Bauer still had questions.

Chris saw three albino redwoods, arranged in a straight line, a short distance from one another. He wondered if these three redwoods, yards apart, might be genetically identical. Maybe they sprung from the same individual. To understand how this is even possible, you need to know about the numerous ways that redwoods can reproduce—some of which involve cloning themselves.

New redwood trees can come about in four ways: through seeds, cuttings, stump sprouts, and root sprouts.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

Like all plants, redwoods can grow from seeds. Redwood seeds come from those tiny, inch-long redwood cones that fall from the branches in autumn. Each cone contains one to two dozen tiny seeds. These seeds were fertilized with redwood pollen; they are mix of genetic material from the parent that made the seed and the parent that made the pollen. However, redwood seeds have a notoriously low germination rate. Hardly any of them will grow into a plant. Which brings us to the next method of redwood tree generation: cuttings.

Redwood trees that you buy from a nursery probably began as cuttings—branches that were cut from a tree. To make a good redwood cutting, horticulturists will cut a branch from a young tree, or sapling, because cuttings from young trees tend to survive better. They treat the cutting with hormones to encourage growth, and plant the cutting in a special blend of soils. After a few months, about 25-35% of the cuttings have formed roots; the others do not survive. Once the cuttings have established, they can grow quite quickly—up to 7 feet in height in a single growing season. Regeneration from existing branches doesn’t just happen in the nursery—it happens in nature too. When a branch falls off a redwood tree, say in a storm, the branch can come in contact with the soil and develop roots. These provide the branch with nutrients and water, and before long the branch has grown into a tree. Trees grown from cuttings or from branches are genetically identical of the tree that donated the branch. (For the same reason, California’s vineyards are very low in genetic diversity; see this article in the New York Times.)

Stump sprouts on a coast redwood. Photo: kqedquest.

Many a majestic redwood tree began as a stump sprout. Stump sprouts are tiny growths from the base of existing trees. They can grow out of a healthy tree, or a tree that has been logged or damaged by fire. Redwoods have extensive underground root systems, which are impervious to trifling things like lumberjacks’ axes and fire. Trees that grow from stumps grow quickly and have a good chance of success, because the trees are automatically connected to a large root system. Multiple stump sprouts from a single trunk form what is called a fairy ring: a ring of trees, with a circular clearing in the middle, because the original tree breaks down. Stump sprouts are generally genetic clones of the original tree. However, the albino redwoods are stump sprouts with a mutation (or two, or three…). The genomic research happening Stanford will hopefully shed some light on how this mutation happens.

A fairy ring. The ring of trees has sprouted from the moss-covered trunk in the middle. Photo: Swiv.

Redwoods don’t just sprout from stumps; they can also sprout new growth from their roots. Redwood roots extend horizontally under the soil. Many redwoods live in flood-prone ecosystems, on the banks of rivers. When redwood forests become flooded, sediment piles up on the surface of the soil, burying the roots a bit deeper than they were before. Redwoods will grow another set of horizontal roots, a little closer to the surface. By digging deep into the ground and counting the horizontal layers of roots, people can tell how many floods a redwood has endured. When new growth sprouts from the surface roots, the original tree soon has a neighbor that is basically an identical twin. This is what Chris thinks is going on with the three albino redwoods, all in a row.

Hopefully Chris can test his hypothesis in a year or two, when the redwood genome is sequenced and we know what mutation (or mutations) cause albinism. Are the three neighboring albino redwoods mutants that sprung from genetically identical trees? Maybe that tree’s genotype is just a little different from that of an albino—and the mutation that causes albinism is very likely to occur. Or maybe the three albinos are a series of chlorophyll-free coincidences. We’ll have to wait patiently for the genome data. But, for a coast redwood that can live for 2,000 years, the wait won’t be long at all.

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UC Santa Cruz plant biologist Jarmila Pitterman studies an albino redwood tree

How many times do we parents of preschoolers hear that question each day? "WHY do birds fly? WHY does the wind blow? WHY do bees buzz? WHY are trees green? WHY do I have to eat my broccoli?"

"Because I SAID so."

"WHY??"

Science begins with our curiosity. The first step is to start asking questions, probably most often “Why?” and “How?” And as much as we wish it were different, in science, "because I said so" is never answer enough. You have to back up your case with some proof, or at least some compelling evidence. And even then, your case will likely not be accepted on its face as truth, but tested and re-tested, re-asked and re-proven via a time-tested set of agreed-upon steps. This is known as the Scientific Method: 1) Ask a question. 2) Construct a hypothesis. 3) Experiment. 4) Analyze your results 5) Repeat if necessary and draw your conclusions. 6) Communicate your findings. While we all come into our questions with personal or cultural beliefs, the scientific method attempts to remove the beliefs of the scientist when testing a hypothesis point the way towards a verifiable fact or facts.

Which, brings us to the rare and unusual albino redwood trees. We already know the facts about trees, right? We can usually answer the preschooler's question about why trees are green. But what if the tree is anything but green?

We don't actually have all the answers to that one. We can hypothesize that these ghosts of the forest must be mutants, and lack chlorophyll. But that’s the easy part. What we don't know, is WHY they lack chlorophyll, and survive. That's a trick that few trees anywhere in the world — if any– can pull off. So right now, we're guessing. And we can do better.

That’s what the research scientists at Stanford and UC Santa Cruz are out to discover. Believe it or not, until now the Redwood genome has never been sequenced. Stanford geneticists want to pinpoint the mutation or mutations that cause these trees to be albino. Plant biologists from UC Santa Cruz seek to determine how these trees survive and grow without chlorophyll and its instrumental role in providing energy for the plant.

In the QUEST Science on the SPOT story "Revisiting Albino Redwoods, Cracking the Code," we follow Stanford geneticists Ghia Euskirchen and Barry Starr from the redwood forests to the lab as they work to uncover the root of the mutation that causes albinism in redwood trees.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

In another Science on the SPOT installment, "Revisiting Albino Redwoods, Biological Mystery," we meet UC Santa Cruz plant biologist Jarmila Pitterman and tag along as she and her students study the inner workings of the unusual albino redwoods.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

This story is just beginning. They’re only in step 3 in the process; experimentation. But in time, the redwood genome will be sequenced. We will know where the mutation is. We will know how these albino trees survive and grow. And in the process we may learn things about the genetic heritage of redwood trees. We may learn more about how all redwood trees live and grow. We may learn how redwood trees adapt to things such as disease or climate change. The answers are endless. They are just waiting for someone to ask: why?

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Who ya gonna call? Stanford Genetics.

I know, I know…hokey title, hokey caption. But in many ways it's true.

Albino redwoods have been called the ghosts of the forest. And scientists from Stanford’s Department of Genetics are on the trail to figure out why these trees have white leaves instead of green.

This all started with a Science on the SPOT story about the albino redwoods by Chris Bauer right here on QUEST. In his accompanying blog post about these "ghost trees", he wondered aloud if any geneticists might be interested in trying to figure out what was going on genetically with these pale trees.

I was intrigued enough that I decided to ask the chair of the Department of Genetics, Dr. Mike Snyder, if he was interested in tackling the problem. By chance, he knew of a scientist in the department, Dr. Ghia Euskirchen, who was also interested in the redwood genome.

In the old days, figuring out what exactly was going on at the DNA level of something as complicated as a redwood would have cost way too much time and money to make a study like this worthwhile (if it was even possible at all). Nowadays things are simpler but still no walk in the park. Instead of elegant, time consuming experiments to pinpoint where the problem might be, scientists will use a more brute force method. They will simply sequence all of the DNA of albino and normal redwoods and compare them.

Sequencing is cheaper, simpler, and less time consuming than the old ways but this isn’t CSI. We’re not going to have answers right after this commercial break. It could still take a couple of years to figure this out. Or, if the biology doesn’t cooperate, even longer.

And the only reason we have a chance to do this so “quickly” is because redwoods can reproduce asexually. In other words, they can throw off clones of themselves.

It just so happens that occasionally, a few of these clones end up albino. What this means is that there shouldn’t be a whole lot of differences between the albino and wild type clones. This should make finding the change that caused the albinism relatively easy. That’s the hope anyway…

I am sure you’ve already started to think how weird it is that a clone ended up different from the original. After all, by definition, clones should be the same.

One letter change turns this watch into a cheap knock
off. The same thing may be going on with albino
redwoods but with DNA letters.In real life, though, clones are not the same as the original. They are more like subtle knock-offs. For example, cloned cats look similar but have different personalities. Same thing with garden variety human clones—identical twins.

So how does a clone end up different from the original? There are many possibilities, here are two:

1. The DNA is different. Even though a clone is really just a copy of the original, cells aren’t perfect at making copies of themselves. You try copying the 30 billion letters of redwood DNA and see how well you do! Most of these changes don’t matter but if one happens to hit and damage one of the hundreds of genes involved in making a redwood green, then you’ll get a white tree.

2. The DNA is used differently. All the cells in a redwood have the same DNA but a root is very different from a leaf. These differences come about because each cell uses its DNA differently. The environment can also affect which gene a cell chooses to turn on and to what level. This is often done with differences in something called methylation which scientists can detect. It may be that methylation has shut off a key gene involved in turning redwood leaves green.

Watch out for at least one more blog on this topic from me dealing with bits of DNA outside of the nucleus that may be involved. And for Chris’ upcoming story on how Stanford scientists are going about solving this albino mystery.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

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For demonstration on how advection fog is created (and how you can do this at home), check out this video we filmed with The Exploratorium's Eric Muller.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

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While foggy days aren't ideal for a summertime picnics, coastal fog does benefit the ecology of the Bay Area.

Normally I wouldn’t be hoping for a chilly, foggy day during the summertime here in San Francisco. For the purposes of filming our Science on the SPOT story, “Science of Fog,” however, we hoped that the Presidio would be socked in with a thick blanket of fog for our interview with UC Berkeley’s Todd Dawson.

Luckily, Mother Nature cooperated with us to give us plenty of atmospheric fog to work with for our shoot. We interviewed Dawson about the two types of fog that are prevalent in the Bay Area, and about his ongoing research on the decline of fog along the California coast.

Dawson also elaborated on some conflicting reports in the media on whether fog was declining or actually increasing. “There was a study done previous to ours over a shorter period of time. It's only about 35 years. And the records came only from the Los Angeles area and from San Francisco. They weren't a comprehensive sort of investigation of all of the temperature records that we've done throughout California.

Those investigators came to the conclusion based on a model that they had developed based on those just temperature records, [with] no fog data. They ran the model, and it gave them an output that says, 'Oh, fog is going to be increasing.'

Our investigation is much longer. It takes place over more than 110 years. It's hourly temperature records and precipitation records. It involves all of the fog data from the airports that we've been able to get throughout the entire state. And, of course, it's a longer period.

And just like the stock market, if you look at a small part of a change in the stock market, on any given day it might look like it's rising. But if you look over 100 years of the stock market, you're going to say that, ‘Ah, stocks have been declining steadily over that longer period of time.’

So what looks to be a bit of a conflict is really just because we're looking at different windows of time and different kinds of information. And I think that's why sometimes people kind of go, "Well, somebody told me that fog's supposed to be increasing.’ And our data is saying no, it's decreasing. It kind of depends on the window of time you're looking at.”

And to learn more about why foggy days – while not ideal for a summertime picnic – benefits the ecology of the Bay Area, check out the Science of Fog.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

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California Coho Salmon are listed as federally protected,
and are critically endangered. Image: Richard James

As we would with any loved one, we care about its health and well being. Over the years we have witnessed wanton pollution from purposeful and "accidental" sewage spills, there has been gravel mining, seemingly unchecked agri-business dumping pesticides and sucking wells dry, and more than anything, precious water has been continuously pumped out and diverted to quench the thirst of the ever-growing populations of Sonoma and Marin Counties. Each one of these factors has taken some of the life and wildness out of the Russian River. And there comes a point when the natural world and The River does not have anything left to give.

Still there is the hope that nature is resilient. One of the best indicators of environmental health on the Russian River would be the return of the native salmon. While producing our story on these magnificent fish we had the privilege to witness the incredibly dedicated conservation fishery biologists at the Don Clausen Fish Hatchery at Lake Sonoma. Seeing them work gave me a lot of hope. These men and women literally hold the future of the coho salmon in their hands. Each egg is tenderly cared for– each little growing fish is carefully identified, numbered and individually tagged before being gently released into the wild. It is an enormous, time-consuming and laborious task. But without them, the critically endangered coho salmon have little or no realistic chance of returning to the Russian River.

Sadly, it seems that much of their work may have gone for naught. In early April 2009, for just one night's frost protection, the wineries of the Russian River valley went against a request by the National Marine Fisheries Service and turned open their taps, taking so much water out of the Russian River watershed that the water-table dramatically dropped resulting in a massive coho salmon die-off. It's another heartbreaking blow to an already perilous situation. The wineries were told specifically about the consequences of their actions last year at a special meeting held by the State Water Resources Control Board. Yet to protect a small percentage of an already glutted crop, the wineries knowingly risked dooming an entire species to extinction.

For more information see:

Quick drop in water level kills coho | The Press Democrat | Santa Rosa, CA
04/04/09
Frost protection measures to save crops stranded fish in Russian River tributary

Coho killed after water diverted to protect crops | SF Chronicle
04/04/09
Endangered coho salmon killed after a sudden drop in the water level…

I have always advocated for The Russian River and its small communities and businesses. I recommend it as the perfect getaway for friends looking for a weekend exploration. Hiking, canoeing, wine-tasting or exploring–The River is the place. In turn I have also regularly recommended and sought out Russian River wines. But I doubt I'll be recommending anything from this year's vintage. I have a feeling the 2009 Russian River wines are going to leave a very bitter taste.

Watch the California's Lost Salmon television story online.

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Pacific Madrone

Marin will look Baja. Berkeley like Bakersfield.

That's the projection of climatologists for the end of this century, if global warming continues on its current path.

But in trying to determine what California's plant life will look like based on those projections, studies and computer models only go so far. Despite the dire warning raised by this recent plant-loss study, biologists say the reality probably will be a lot worse.

In trying to get your mind around the idea that two-thirds of California's endemic plant species will lose 80 percent of their range by the end of the century, there are two ways to look at it.

The first is that, well, plants will just be different. It's not as if we're going to have barren soil where plants are now. As climate changes and warms, plants will most likely shift to the north. If we're talking an 8.3 degree Celsius shift in the summers, that means a rise of about 15 degrees Fahrenheit during the summer. Desert plants would move into Bakersfield and the Central Valley, for example. And in the Bay Area, the climate would be more similar to Southern California.

So, one way to think about it is: Plants will migrate or shift to cooler climates, so our endemic plants wouldn't necessarily disappear – they would just shift north.

But there were many factors that were NOT included in the plant-loss projection. And, as study author David Ackerly says, they are sobering.

If plants migrate, where will they go, and how will they get there? They need a certain type of soil, a certain amount of water. Many times, they interact with and need the plants or animals around them to survive; for instance, the gooseberry might need an animal that likes its berries so that its seed can be spread. And they don't just get up and walk north. It's a long, laborious process that can easily be derailed.

During the last Ice Age, plants migrated a thousand miles, Ackerly says, over about a thousand years. So why can't plants here move a hundred miles in a hundred years? Let us count the ways.

So IF the soils are compatible, IF the entire ecosystem of plants and animals can successfully travel north, IF such sites as vernal pools can somehow be created in the north, IF those ecosystems can somehow leapfrog over cities, farms, reservoirs, roads, ranches and other developments and find a compatible area that doesn't already have a robust ecosystem, IF the slow-growing plants can somehow travel a mile a year for the next hundred years, then yes, you'll successfully have a new habitat in a different place farther north.

Biologists suspect that most endemic plant species in California will die, if climate change continues at the same pace. For instance, redwood trees could still be growing in California by the end of the century, because the adults are hardy – but scientists say it will be a forest of the "living dead," meaning that, if no seedlings can make it, those adults will be the last redwoods on earth.

And the plants that come in to replace California plants, they say, will be invasive species – more commonly known as weeds – the fast-growing Mediterranean-climate plants with light, airborne seeds that will take over a barren area.

That's different plant life, true. But it's unlikely, they say, that our madrone or bay ecosystems will actually be re-created a hundred miles away, unless we move them up there ourselves.


View a slideshow of the"Disappearing Plants" Radio Report online, as well as find additional links and resources.

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