Vanishing Aspen

Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics: "...Unlike the East, where aspen often regenerate via seeds, the West has drier, less hospitable conditions that require a different survival strategy—vegetative reproduction. An extensive root system lies just beneath the ground surface in an aspen grove. New shoots grow directly out of these roots. A stand of aspen that appears to be many trees is more likely one organism, all clones from the same parent root system.

And some aspen groves have been around for a very long time. “We have clones here in Utah that are hundreds of acres in size,” says Dale Bartos, aspen ecologist at the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station in Logan, Utah. “If that started from a single seed, then that genetic material has been on-site for thousands of years.”

But the essential fact of aspen ecology in the West is that the trees have prospered by being continually destroyed by fire. “Aspen is a fire-dependent species,” Bartos says. “It thrives on getting killed.” [...]"