Scientists keep eye on rare plant burned in Springs Fire

A rare succulent found only in the Santa Monica Mountains bloomed as the Springs Fire exploded last spring, burning a path from Camarillo to the Pacific Ocean.

A threatened species, the Verity's liveforever could be found in just eight spots in the mountains, all in the footprint of the early-season wildfire. Experts doubt that all have been destroyed. But where several thousand plants grew before, few appear unscathed by the flames.

"We're very concerned," said Stephen McCabe, the research director at the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum who has studied liveforever species since the 1980s. "But we're not sure until we see what will happen in the winter ... and how much recovery will happen."

McCabe and plant ecologist John Tiszler have not been able to assess all eight locations but have visited several sites since the fire. Of those on public land, two spots are on the CSU Channel Islands campus and a third on county property.

"We really only saw about 10 plants that looked completely untouched," said Tiszler, a plant ecologist with the National Park Service.

"Everything else was either burned or scorched," he said. "It's not like it was bare earth. There were lots of little dry plants still on those rock faces."

The question is whether they are dead or will come back after some rain.

Found on rock faces in areas blanketed with heavy marine fog, the plants often are sunken into beds of lichens — another complication for the recovery because the lichen also burned. It's just one of the liveforever species, named for its ability to survive up to several months in plant presses when it was first collected here and taken back to Europe, McCabe said.

At the arboretum, McCabe grows plants, which helps him study the classifications and potentially provides backups for rare wild populations. If needed, seeds collected from garden-grown plants might be used for population restoration, he said.

However, the success of such an intervention for the rare plants and its necessity are unclear.

"Obviously, it existed in an area where fire has been an element forever," Tiszler said.

But officials say fires historically were a lot less frequent.

"The concern is that environmental conditions are changing in ways that are going to impact the plant," he said.

A fire burned a similar path through the mountains in 1993. The Verity's liveforever survived that blaze, but the fire came in the fall, during the plant's mostly dormant period.

This time, the fire occurred during the plant's growth season and likely before it spread seeds.

In coming months, CSUCI students likely will start monitoring the plant's recovery, said Steven Norris, who teaches biology and started surveying native plants on campus 10 years ago.

He said most of the Verity's liveforevers he has seen since the Springs Fire look fairly dry and toasted. But he has spotted innermost leaves that still look green, which might indicate at least some will recover, he said.

"It would be almost unbelievable if you went in there and found every plant was gone," Tiszler said.

But any species needs to maintain a critical number to ensure long-term survival, he said. "What the fire could do is have an adverse impact that sets it down into a trajectory where it doesn't recover."