Coast Redwood

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

No tree species on the planet grows taller than the coast redwood, native to a narrow band along the Pacific coast from central California to southern Oregon. Individual redwoods reach roughly 110 meters, more than a third the height of the Eiffel Tower. Some coast redwoods alive today are estimated to be around 2,000 years old, long enough that a tree standing today may have germinated before the Roman Empire fell.

That scale depends heavily on the coastal fog that keeps the trees supplied with moisture through the dry California summer. Fog accounts for nearly forty percent of a coast redwood's water uptake during the dry months, condensing on the leaves and dripping down toward the roots. The tree's range has always been narrower than California's coastline as a whole, confined to the specific belt where that fog reaches consistently.

Much of the old growth forest that once covered that strip, roughly two million acres before large scale logging began, had been reduced to about ten percent of its original extent by the 1960s. The redwood the public now most often encounters, tall as it still is, is frequently second growth rather than the original ancient stands. What old growth remains is now concentrated in protected land, including Redwood National Park, established in 1968 specifically to preserve what was left of the original forest.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In 2013, the IUCN Red List classified the coast redwood as Endangered, the same category applied to species whose wild populations are genuinely at risk of disappearing. To anyone who has walked through a healthy stand of second growth redwood forest today, that classification can read as strange, even wrong. A 2017 US Forest Service report by researcher Erin Clover Kelly examined exactly that gap and argued the listing, while procedurally defensible, is substantively misleading.

Kelly's argument turns on how the Red List's criteria work. Redwood was listed under criterion A2acd, a population decline measure resting partly on a claimed decline in area of occupancy and partly on exploitation, including a claim that commercial operators manage forests to favor faster growing competitor species such as Douglas fir over redwood after harvest. Kelly found little support for either basis. She writes that the extent of redwoods is essentially unchanged, shifting only slightly at its margins, with contraction at the southern end of the range and expansion at the northern end, and that redwoods are still found throughout their historical range, with little evidence that urbanization threatens that range. On the separate claim about competitor species, Kelly notes that the IUCN provided no citations to support it, and that follow up correspondence with the listing's author did not produce further citations. Kelly's point is that this framing fits redwood poorly, because the actual conservation stakes for redwood were never about individual trees going extinct. There is no credible scenario where coast redwood as a species disappears from California; the trees themselves are neither rare nor imperiled in that sense. The real, well documented loss is ecosystem functionality: the near total disappearance of true old growth stands, the structural complexity, the centuries deep canopy, and the web of species that depends on forest that old, none of which criterion A2 is built to measure.

This is captured on the atlas as a formal dissent attached to the conservation status fact itself, not folded quietly into the description, because it is exactly the kind of documented, expert disagreement the record exists to preserve rather than resolve by picking a side.