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Health & Fitness

Park Champions Program Tackles Sudden Oak Death at China Camp State Park

A group of dedicated volunteers came to China Camp State Park on Wednesday, August 14, to help young oaks grow into stately and majestic trees. It was all part of the Park Champions program, which is sponsored by the California State Parks Foundation. The program has volunteer work days in state parks all over California and has been instrumental in involving the community in the protection of our natural heritage. There is a range of activities for volunteers to do on a Park Champions day, such as restoring salt marshes at Candlestick State Recreation Area, building traditional Miwok kotchas at Olompali State Historic Park, or removing invasive weeds at Half Moon Bay State Beach.

The activity at China Camp was both physical and educational in nature. Volunteers fanned out across the grassy hillsides on the southern edge of the park, above the Glenwood neighborhood of San Rafael. They were looking for young oak trees that were surrounded by protective wire fencing and marked with an ID tag. The Park Champions day project was organized by Joyce Abrams and Andy Kives of Friends of China Camp, involving a volunteer work force that came from around the Bay Area. Julia and her son Dylan came from Campbell in the South Bay. Trisha came down from Sebastopol. Other volunteers were more local, coming from San Rafael and Novato.

It was hard work, traipsing across the grassy hillsides with armloads of tools. The young oak trees were scattered across the grasslands, interspersed with coyote brush, thistle, and poison oak. The task at hand was to remove the wire fencing from around the trees, releasing them to the wild. The fencing was necessary when the trees were small saplings and needed protection from deer browsing, but most of them were big enough now to withstand the ravages of wildlife. Data was also recorded, writing down the condition of each tree, any visible problems, the ID number from a small metal tag, and the UTM coordinates. UTM stands for Universal Transverse Mercator, which is a plane coordinate system developed by the United States Army Corps of Engineers in the 1940s to accurately pinpoint exact locations on the surface of the Earth.

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After the wire fencing was removed, the supporting metal posts also had to be yanked from the ground. This was done with a very handy tool called a “Pullerbear,” a lever with a grip that is often used to pull deep-rooted French broom out the ground. 15-year old Dylan took to this task with great enthusiasm. “I want to use that tool!” he exclaimed as soon as he saw it. He quickly learned how to get a good grip around the base of the posts and use the lever to push down and force the deeply embedded posts out of the ground. After liberating each tree, we gathered up the debris, including the wire fencing and metal posts, carrying it up the hill to a waiting truck.   

The trees were planted in 2001, as part of project carried out by Marin ReLeaf, a local nonprofit organization that teamed with UC Berkeley researchers to learn more about Sudden Oak Death. Sandra Sellinger, President and founder of Marin ReLeaf, became concerned when the fire department began to cut down eucalyptus trees on the ridge above her Glenwood home, with no plans to replace them with more appropriate native trees.

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“I wasn’t going to let that happen,” she said, and began to take action. She teamed up with UC Berkeley on a project to learn more about Sudden Oak Death and how it was spreading in the area. The aim of the project was to find trees that had some sort of resistance to the disease. Acorns were harvested from healthy coast live oaks within a five-mile range, in order to match the specific DNA of trees that were flourishing in the area. 500 volunteers worked to plant the acorns starting in 2001, with successive plantings taking place over the next three years.

The oak woodlands of China Camp State Park have been hit hard by Sudden Oak Death in the past two decades. It has baffled scientists and researchers who have been looking for ways to prevent the spread of this disease, which first appeared in Marin County in 1995. It has since spread to most of coastal California and into southern Oregon. The disease affects tanoaks, coast live oaks, and black oaks, as well as other broadleaf trees such as madrone, bay laurel, buckeye, and bigleaf maple. It has now killed thousands of trees over a wide area.

Sudden Oak Death is now prevalent in many areas of China Camp, leaving the forest with dead or dying trees alongside many of the trails. It is caused by a plant pathogen known as Phytophthora ramorum, which spreads its spores with the help of mist and rain, moving across the forest canopy and down to the understory below.

The coast live oak (Quercus agrifolia), is one of the signature trees of California, with its serenely gnarled branches reaching toward the sky above grassy hillsides. It was an important tree for the Miwok and other native California tribes for centuries, producing acorns that were a staple food of the traditional diet. The demise of the coast live oak would be a tragedy for the natural environment of California, so it is critically important that we take steps to stop the spread of Sudden Oak Death.

What can be done to stop the spread of Sudden Oak Death?

There are simple steps that individuals can do to slow the onslaught of Sudden Oak Death across our forest. The U.S. Forest Service makes the following recommendations:

  • Do not collect or remove host plants or plant parts from the forest.
  • Do not collect or remove soil.
  • Stay on established trails and respect trail closures.
  • Before leaving infested areas, clean and disinfect equipment such as saws, shovels and pruning equipment you used in infested areas; wash soil off tires, wheel wells and the undercarriage of your vehicle
  • Clean soil off shoes, mountain bikes, horse hooves and pet paws.
  • For best protection, use a 10-percent bleach solution for cleaning.
  • Buy healthy plants from reputable nurseries.

Marin ReLeaf continues its work with the coast live oak and other trees, researching the effects of urban trees on carbon sequestration around Marin County. They are preparing a survey of trees in the San Rafael area, with the goal of gathering data to help manage the natural resources of the county.

This Park Champions program helped out with recording some of this data, and carried out the work day together with Friends of China Camp (FOCC). FOCC is a nonprofit organization that is partnering with California State Parks to operate China Camp and keep the park open. They will be hosting the annual Heritage Day festival at China Camp Village this weekend, on Saturday, August 17, from 11:30 AM to 4:00 PM.







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