Majority of Santa Rosa Island’s Rare Torrey Pines Predicted to Perish

The news that conservationists around the world had been bracing for since mid-May arrived quietly, in a park service announcement on September 1: many of Santa Rosa Island's iconic Torrey pines are not expected to survive.

Specialists with the federal Burn Area Emergency Response (BAER) team estimate that 60 to 80 percent of the island's rare Torrey pine grove may perish from the effects of the Santa Rosa Island Fire, according to the Santa Barbara Independent. The figure is a gut punch for a tree that exists in the wild in only two places on Earth — a grove near San Diego and this one, the sole home of the island subspecies, sitting just off the Santa Barbara coast.

For a community that thinks of the Channel Islands as its own backyard, the loss lands close to home.

A Fire That Made Islands History

The blaze ignited May 15 after a man reportedly crashed his sailboat into the island, and it burned 18,379 acres — nearly two-fifths of Santa Rosa — before firefighters finally contained it on June 4. It stands as the largest wildfire ever recorded in Channel Islands history, an island with a limited natural fire history and little evolved defense against it.

As the fire spread through the grove, news traveled around the globe, and the question on every conservationist's mind was whether trees that had persisted for millennia on that windswept island could survive a burn they had rarely, if ever, experienced. The last census, taken in 2014, counted roughly 24,000 Torrey pines of all ages on the island, including about 3,000 mature, cone-producing trees.

The answer, BAER specialists confirmed after field reconnaissance on the island from June 5 to June 10, is that the fire hit the grove hard. Early hopes that the trees might pull through have largely given way to a sober accounting of what can be saved.

Seeds, Soil, and a Race Against Winter

But the story on Santa Rosa is not simply one of loss. Within days of containment, park staff and cooperators were already collecting what the fire left behind: more than 14,000 Torrey pine seeds released from cones after the burn. Viable seeds will be propagated in an island nursery and grown into seedlings, with the remainder placed in a seed bank — with the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden standing ready as a repository on the mainland.

There is a quiet poetry to the timing. In March, months before the sailboat ever ran aground, the Botanic Garden planted its own grove of 45 off-island Torrey pine saplings for conservation, explicitly preparing for catastrophes like this one. The garden's foresight now dovetails with the park service's scramble.

Park staff expect to plant roughly 300 to 500 seedlings across a 15-acre restoration area within the burned grove. But first comes the urgent work: winter storms are approaching, and the burned hillsides are highly vulnerable to erosion. If the fragile topsoil is washed away before seedlings can take root, the forest's future washes away with it.

"While many mature trees cannot be saved, biologists say the soil beneath them can," the park service said. The BAER team identified protecting the grove's slopes as one of the island's highest priorities before winter arrives.

Hard Words, Steady Hands

"The potential loss of so many mature Torrey pines is heartbreaking," Channel Islands National Park Superintendent Ethan McKinley said in the park service's announcement. "But we must resolve ourselves to focus on what we can save, and the next few months are critical. The fire may be over, but we're now in a race against time. Protecting these slopes before winter storms arrive gives us the best opportunity to restore this extraordinary landscape for future generations."

The park service won't be starting from scratch. It brings more than 15 years of experience restoring the island's rare cloud forest, which suffered decades of erosion and habitat loss. Many of those same techniques — from erosion control to native plant propagation — can be adapted for the Torrey pine grove. National Park Service biologist David Mazurkiewicz, who is leading post-fire restoration on the island, has been examining burned cones for viable seeds even as erosion crews work the slopes above.

The Rest of the Island

The BAER reports covered far more than the pines — watersheds, cultural resources, wildlife, trails, even paleontological resources — and the broader picture is cautiously hopeful.

Most of the island's grasslands and shrubs are expected to recover naturally. A majority of the habitat containing other federally protected species either didn't burn or burned at low severity, and only a small portion of the rare oaks in the Cloud Forest Restoration Site was affected. An estimated 5 percent of the island's endemic Dudleya population — a succulent found nowhere else on Earth — was impacted, though officials say it will need monitoring.

Wildlife impacts were considered minimal for mobile species like the Channel Islands fox. The one sobering caveat: the fire burned during nesting season for the island's resident birds.

For now, the focus stays on the slopes above the blackened grove, where crews are trying to hold the soil that a forest might someday grow from. The trees that shaped Santa Rosa's skyline for centuries may be mostly gone. The seeds, at least, are already in hand.