News Clippings

Trees Tell Of Warming Climate

What can trees tell us about climate change? Last September, Professor Hugh Safford, a forest ecologist in the UC Davis Department of Environmental Science and Policy, was hiking for pleasure in California’s High Sierra when he stumbled upon a Jeffrey pine at an altitude it shouldn’t exist.

“I walk over, and it’s a Jeffrey pine! It made no sense. What is a Jeffrey pine doing above 11,500 feet?” During his hike-turned-science-expedition, Safford found and examined 14 Jeffrey pines above 11,800 feet, some of which were at least 20 years old. At least a dozen others were visible. 

The discovery signifies a changing climate amid California’s highest peaks. As snow melts earlier and air temperatures rise, Jeffrey pine seeds are germinating on land they previously found frozen and inhospitable. Preliminary evidence suggests a bird, the Clark’s nutcracker, carries fleshy Jeffrey pine seeds up the mountain, storing them in the High Sierra’s “refrigerator” for an early summer snack, thus enabling some seeds to not only germinate, but establish themselves as a new population.

Jeffrey pines are not considered a traditional subalpine tree species, which inhabit the most extreme high elevations. Yet none of the six traditional subalpine forest species have been collected above 12,034 feet. Safford recorded Jeffrey pines as high as 12,657 feet (1,860 feet higher than the previous record for the species.) This suggests the Jeffrey pine is California’s highest tree — at least for the moment.

Safford’s work indicates that other species are growing higher than commonly used databases suggest. Species attempting to stay ahead of climate changes by moving uphill are doing so far too slowly to keep pace, climate modeling literature suggests. Yet the models don’t account for the role of seed dispersals by birds and other species amid shifting windows of ecological opportunity.

“I’m looking at trees surviving in habitats where they couldn’t before, but they’re also dying in places they used to live before,” Safford said. “This crazy leapfrogging of species challenges what we think we know about these systems reacting as the climate warms.” 

The discovery underscores a need for scientists to couple powerful technologies with direct observation. The trees Safford encountered were not detected by any available database, artificial intelligence platform, satellite or remote sensing technology.

“People aren’t marching to the tops of the mountains to see where the trees really are,” Safford said. “Instead, they are relying on satellite imagery, which can’t see most small trees. What science does is help us understand how the world functions. In this case, where you see the impacts of climate change most dramatically are at high elevations and high latitudes. If we want our finger on the pulse of how the climate is warming and what the impacts are, that’s where it will be happening first. We just need to get people out there.”

This summer, Safford and students from his lab will return to the southern Sierra Nevada this summer to further research.

AHS Introduces Youth Sensory Gardening Manual

The American Horticultural Society recently introduced the "AHS Youth Sensory Gardening Manual," a free new digital resource detailing how to create gardens to support children’s health. The manual was created by AHS and written by Dr. Amy Wagenfeld, professor at University of Washington and past presenter at the AHS National Children & Youth Garden Symposium. Through an additional collaboration with Kids Cancer Connection, AHS will provide over 200 hospitals throughout the country with the digital manual to support their children’s healthcare initiatives.

Using neuroscience, developmental theory, horticultural therapy, and garden design, this interdisciplinary manual establishes the specific health benefits derived from connecting with nature, followed by details of how the sensory systems enable those benefits. Readers explore each of the eight external and internal sensory systems to learn how people process each sense, sensory processing challenges, and how to support a range of sensory experiences and behaviors. The manual also addresses techniques for universal design and supporting all kinds of inclusion. The appendix includes tools for charting sensory gardening goals and building corresponding plants and materials palettes. Find it here: https://ahsgardening.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/AHS-Youth-Sensory-Gardening-Manual.pdf.

Golf Course Pesticides & Parkinson’s Disease

Could pesticides used on golf courses be affecting the prevalence of Parkinson’s disease? According to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and reported by Newsweek and many other news outlets in May, researchers found that those living within a mile of golf courses have a 126% higher risk of developing Parkinson's disease (PD) than those who live more than six miles away. Areas that shared drinking water supplies with water used near golf courses were the most greatly impacted. 

National medical adviser for the Parkinson's Foundation Dr. Michael Okun posted to X: "This new JAMA Network Open study offers a warning we can't ignore: living within 1-3 miles of a golf course more than doubles your odds of developing Parkinson's. Drinking water from municipal wells near golf courses in vulnerable groundwater areas may be a risk. This isn't about golf—it's about pesticides, environmental exposures, and preventable risks hiding in plain sight."

New Concrete & Moss Facades Create True Green Buildings

A Dutch firm is hoping to take the concept of Green buildings to a literal level. Though Respyre was founded in 2021, social media has been buzzing recently with the story of young inventor and CEO Auke Bleij and his upcycled bio-receptive concrete which is able to retain water and promote moss growth— filtering air pollution and creating a breathing ecosystem—without damaging the underlying concrete. The firm has won numerous innovation awards and now has eight active projects and a product dubbed VertiScape™ available for new construction or renovation. At the heart of VertiScape is the bioreceptive cladding which is applied to an underlying structure. A bio-gel is then applied to the cladding, allowing moss spores to attach to the surface, creating an eco-facade.

According to Respyre’s site: Bioreceptive wall facades are a sustainable form of wall decoration. The product is 85% circular, created out of granulate ruble and reactivated cement, providing old landfills with new purposes. Moreover, over the lifetime of the facades, CO₂ will react with the calcium that is inside the granulate matter and be captured as calcium-carbonate, significantly reducing the CO₂ emission. Together with the moss growth, the product will be carbon-negative within a year, continuing to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere.

Currently VertiScape is only available in The Netherlands and Belgium, but the potential applications for structures in a landscape design is intriguing. To learn more, visit gorespyre.com.

Reduce Bird Collisions With Visible Glass

Glass fences and panels are wonderful for creating sleek, modern landscape designs that allow full appreciation of a view or line of vision. But unfortunately, this design choice can come with its downside: bird collisions. 

A recent article by Rachel Fritts of Wildhope.tv detailed the efforts of a newly formed bird collision prevention team at the National Zoo. The goal? Make all the zoo’s glass bird-safe. Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute in Washington, D.C., sees hundreds of birds stop each year as they make their way up and down the Atlantic Flyway. When designing a safe, new bird house in 2018, it occurred to staff to monitor bird-glass collisions on the property and found hundreds of birds were falling victim. “The majority of birds that crash into windows do not die directly at the window,” Brian Evans, a migratory bird ecologist at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, told Wildhope. “If you’ve got windows, most likely there are birds colliding with them.”

As a result, last spring, staff started covering the zoo’s 10,00 square feet of glass in square decals spaced in a 2” by 2” grid.

The zoo received funds to buy the decals from Feather Friendly, a company specializing in technologies which make glass visible to birds with modern, clean designs. Past projects have included the National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado and Cuyahoga Community College in Ohio. According to the Bird Collision Prevention Alliance, other companies offering film solutions include CollidEscape and SOLYX. There are also facade cladding systems, motorized shade systems, and etched or digital printed glass such as SkySafe™Glass with Surface one Ecoetch® from Skyline Design. For more information, visit stopbirdcollisions.org.

Photo: Moss building facade by Respyre

Read the article in the digital issue here.