subject: The Redwood Parks in California [print this page] The most productive forest land in the United States lies in a narrow strip along the California coast from just north of the Oregon border to Monterey County south of San Francisco. Here may be found 1.74 million acres1 of the nation's tallest trees, the Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens).
The most spectacular groves of redwoods are found at the mouths of rivers and on river benches where periodic flooding over time deposited layers of nutrient-rich soil. Unlike other trees, redwoods were able to put out new roots into each fresh layer and thrive while other species suffocated and disappeared. These small groves of very large, old trees are relatively rare and are not typical of most of the redwood forest. They probably never exceeded 10 percent of the total redwood forest area.
These groves are the best of the redwoods and they have been preserved. In fact, no other commercial species in the world has had so great a proportion of its trees set aside forever in government parks and other reserves.
There are 350,800 acres of land in the publicly owned redwood coastal units comprised of Redwood National Park, the federal monuments, state parks and forests, national forests, city and county parks and other public reserves and administratively withdrawn lands in the Redwood Region.Of this, 78,500 acres are held by the National Park Service, 186,000 acres are in state parks, 51,100 are in a state-owned forest and 35,200 are in the other public reserves. In addition to the 140,100 acres of young redwood forests withdrawn in the public parks and reserves, a total of 98,500 acres of outstanding old groves are preserved here.
The redwood companies operating today all have deep roots in the history of the Redwood Region, and all have donated or transferred superlative groves of trees in their holdings to Save the Redwoods League, Nature Conservancy, the State of California and other public agencies for preservation in parks.
In addition to the numerous parks in the North Coast area, 95 percent of the acreage of the state's other redwood speciesthe Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron gigantea) of the Sierra Nevadais preserved in state and federal groves.
Clearly, hundreds of thousands of acres of redwood parks and groves have been preserved forever.
