Preliminary estimates of sequoia mortality in the 2020 Castle Fire

Although some of California’s giant sequoia trees have stood for thousands of years and are adapted to withstand frequent low and mixed severity fires (Stephenson 1996), preliminary estimates suggest that the 2020 Castle Fire killed between 31% to 42% of large sequoias within the Castle Fire footprint, or 10% to 14% of all large sequoias across the tree’s natural range in the Sierra Nevada. This translates to an estimated loss of 7,500 to 10,600 large sequoias (those with trunk diameters of 4 feet or more). These estimates may change as new data are collected.