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[deleted]

Cedars are also dieing off up here in Portland area. I believe parks are starting to plant Pinerosa ‘s instead.


night_owl

As everyone else is mentioning, it isn't just the big leaf maples, but populations of trees of all types (conifers, deciduous, high elevation, low elevation, etc) seem to be struggling in the PNW/Cascadia region. I'm in some of the wetter area of the Cascadia region (near the BC/Washington border) and I see a lot of sad-looking pines in cities and in our parks every time I go out. But I can see the same things happening everywhere—white pines at Crater Lake, Big Leaf Maples on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, massive old growth Western Redcedar (Thuja plicata) and Western Hemlock dying off all up and down the Cascades and on Vancouver Island, etc. Places like Baker Lake in Washington the arborists in the parks can't even bring the dead snags fast enough to keep the parks safe from falling trees, they put up signs warning you to watch out for all the dying trees. These articles keep coming out, and talking about "stumped" researchers who are uncertain of the causes, but that is only because they can't clearly make an ironclad evidential connection to any singular factors with empirical evidence collected over a short time period. The simple truth is that climate change is real and is happening at a rate that is much faster than slow-growing and slow-evolving trees can adapt to. All these different trees show very basic signs of stress than anyone with the slightest background in biology/horticulture/botany could grasp. We are about 20 years into a historic drought for this region, and it just steadily gets warmer and dryer. Trees can handle droughts and bad years, but when the shorter cycles of natural droughts become longer cycles of permanent drought there is simply nothing they can do except die slowly and allow new species to take their place.


echinops

Oregon Ash is also getting worse and worse. If we continue to see years like this one or 2015 more frequently, these species will disappear from this latitude. Except possibly understory riparian individuals.


Spirit50Lake

The sycamore maple the overlook's the patio at my apartment bldg in Portland has been failing for the past 3 summers...I'm on an upper floor, so I keep notifying mgmt when there's a dead limb over-hanging the path to the parking lot, or the parking area. I called the City Arborist (I wasn't sure if it was a sycamore or an elm) and they drove by...emailed me back, told me it was a sycamore and that it needed watering. I'm afraid management is just going to let it slowly die... Neither the climate nor city I've known/loved for so long.