On Friday morning, May 15, a 67-year-old shipwrecked sailor crashed his boat into the rocks of Santa Rosa Island and later sent emergency flares into the air for help.
Authorities said the flares started a fire, and environmentalists watched closely as the blaze began to creep toward the Torrey Pines groves, one of only two places in the world where the rare tree species naturally grows. But, much to their relief, while patches of trees did burn down, the majority “remain largely intact.”
“We all hoped the fire would never reach the Torrey Pines, but it did,” said Heather Schneider, director of conservation and research at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden. “Now that it’s looking like it was a mostly low-intensity fire and that most trees are still intact, I think we all breathed a big sigh of relief.”
Firefighters have since contained 97% of the fire, which, driven by high-powered winds, spread to over 18,300 acres, torching through one-third of the island.
As firefighting efforts begin to wrap-up on Santa Rosa Island, one of eight California Channel Islands, local environmentalists are wondering how conservation efforts will move forward to restore one of the most unique ecosystems in the world.
The island, located 40 miles off the Ventura Coast, is 53,000 acres of rugged coastline, deep-cut canyons and rolling grasslands. Because of its geographical isolation and unique microclimate—which is cooler and foggier than most of mainland California—Santa Rosa Island hosts approximately 500 plant and 100 wildlife species, of which 46 are endemic to the Channel Islands.
“Islands are special in that way,” Schneider said.
They have numerous unique flora and fauna both by virtue of being habitats that can house ancient lineages of plants like the Torrey Pines but also the plants, brought by animals, humans or wind, that have evolved to become unique to their mainland counterparts, she said.
For Schneider, the scope of the fire was a “wake-up call.”
“At least in modern history, there hasn’t been a fire nearly this big on that island,” Schneider said.
A self-proclaimed “seed nerd,” Schneider leads research and recovery efforts at the garden to protect California’s native plants.
Over the past few years, her team at the garden has been harvesting seeds from the Torrey Pines grove on Santa Rosa Island for its own conservation grove at the garden, which was just installed in March.
“It’s eerie timing with how recently we just installed that,” Schneider said. “This is why we do what we do and why we undertake these long-term efforts.”
The Santa Barbara Botanic Garden is the official seed bank of Channel Islands National Park, holding the largest collection of seeds from Channel Island plants across California, including all the rare plant species that are in the path of fire.
The seed bank acts as an “insurance policy” that the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden and others keep in case they need to do any replanting in its conservation grove.
“Thanks to those efforts, we have a nice repository of seeds that we can use to either do seeding or grow plants and put plants back out on Santa Rosa Island if we find that we need that after we’re able to evaluate the impacts of the fire,” Schneider said.
Schneider says she’s been in touch with personnel at Channel Islands National Park about the garden’s ability to help. But once the fire’s contained, she and the garden will have more of an idea with what that would look like. Some of the earliest steps they’ll take are getting out onto the island, assessing the damage and then deciding what kind of recovery or restoration needs to be done.
While Santa Rosa Island attracts avid campers and hiking enthusiasts year-round for its natural beauty and undeveloped coastline, anthropologists’ main draw is the 13,000-year history of the island’s occupants, and the larger story they tell about the history of human civilization.
In 1959, the archeologist Phill Orr made a ground-breaking discovery on the island, uncovering the remains of some of North America’s oldest inhabitants.
Before European colonists first settled on the Channel Islands 200 years ago, the Chumash tribe lived on the island for nearly 10,000 years. In the 1800s, the island came under the rule of Mexico, then the Carillo brothers and their daughters, whose husbands began ranching on the island.
Ranching on the Channel Islands lasted nearly 150 years, which introduced sheep, pigs, elk and deer. In 1986, the National Park Service purchased Santa Rosa Island and began removing those non-native species from the island in the 1990s to help recover native vegetation. When USGS scientists surveyed the island in the 1990s, they were unable to locate much of the native plant species once there; what remained was found on areas inaccessible to grazing animals.
After the last of these invasive animals were removed in 2012 and 2013, “the islands have been on a trajectory of recovery,” Schneider said.
“There was a lot of natural recovery, and there’s been a lot of work by Channel Islands National Park, the garden and other island collaborators to also do active restoration and recovery,” Schneider said. “So in a way, [the fire] feels like a little bit of a reset. It’s definitely a perturbation of a recovering system.”
Schneider says this fire will also be a good learning opportunity for understanding how the pines respond after.
“I think between that, the low-intensity fire and the garden’s conservation grove, I feel cautiously optimistic,” Schneider said.
But with climate change exacerbating the threat of more frequent, larger-scale disasters, Schneider is also thinking about the possibility of another big disaster.
As a conservationist, she’s paying attention to changing temperature and rainfall patterns that could impact the germination of Channel Islands plants and lead to their gradual decline.
“In modern history, fire has been relatively rare on the island,” Schneider said. “I know that a lot of us are thinking about, under hotter, drier conditions, could we start to see more fire? How do we prepare for that?”
