Michael Taylor is a LiDAR specialist working for Pacific Forest Trust, a non-profit organization in San Francisco dedicated to working with landowners to conserve well-managed forests and build resilient landscapes in the Pacific Northwest. His current assignment is to find the tallest trees of California and Southern Oregon. He met our Executive Director Maria at Camp Sugar Pine back in 2014, where there once stood a giant sugar pine known as the “Whelan Tree”. It was bigger than any other sugar pine in modern history. The cut end of the upper log (as seen in the pictures below) is about eight feet thick at 75 feet off the ground!

“I’ve always loved pine trees and redwood trees since I was a kid,” said Taylor during our phone interview. “When I was camping, I would gravitate towards sugar pines and ponderosa pines because of their stately, columnar trunks and fragrant pitch terpenes. To some they are reminiscent of vanilla, butterscotch or even crème soda.” Taylor earned an engineering degree from Humboldt State in 1998. His early career took him on the path of an engineer, but he quickly learned that his true calling was to go find the biggest and tallest coast redwoods of Humboldt, Mendocino and Del Norte counties. “I was looking for the tallest of Sugar pine, Ponderosa pine and Giant sequoia and started exploring the Sierra Nevada’s and Siskiyou County in Oregon.” Taylor mentions having once measured a 268.3-foot Ponderosa pine at Big Pine Campground in Briggs Valley, Oregon and at the time it was considered the world’s tallest.

“Searching for the biggest and tallest redwoods was a new frontier at the time I started, as there was only one other person actively searching for them.” That other person was a postal worker named Ron Hildebrant, of McKinleyville. He met Taylor in 1990; they shared big tree discoveries and went exploring together for new giants. Other than Taylor and Hildebrant, there was nobody else doing this on a regular basis. Today there are dozens of explorers combing through the vast redwood forests looking for new undiscovered giants; and they are still finding them.

The project he is currently working on is identifying the tallest of the primary conifers of the Pacific Northwest. These “primary” species include White pine, Sugar pine, Jeffrey pine, Ponderosa pine, Noble fir, Douglas fir, Red fir, Sitka spruce, Coast redwood, Giant sequoia, Western hemlock, Incense cedar and Western Red Cedar. Taylor is also identifying the tallest Eucalyptus and Valley oak of the same regions. Of these species, Taylor has already catalogued the top fifty tallest of each and still finding new tall trees from newly released LiDAR.

Taylor uses a technology called LiDAR, which stands for “Light Detection and Ranging.” LiDAR is an extremely popular remote sensing method used for measuring a precise distance to surface features on the Earth. A scanning laser (or group of them) is mounted on an airplane, helicopter or a drone and aimed downward to the ground, where it then bounces back to laser sensor built into the LiDAR scanner. The time it takes for the signal to return can tell you how far away that object is, its elevation above sea level, and the coordinates in space. When used in a forestry setting or over an area with dense vegetation, the laser will sweep the area multiple times to gather multiple returns, which are then stitched together. This method constructs an image in real time of a forest which can be processed into a color-coded height band (as seen in the rainbow image). This is called Canopy Height Modeling or “CHM”.

It was not until the 1980’s that this technology gained popularity for its many applications. Taylor used to measure trees by using a clinometer and tapeline, but that technique often led to difficult field conditions and inaccurate data. Taylor mentions “Measuring a tree accurately back in the day was nearly impossible until the availability of reflector-less laser range finders become affordable to the general public.” Now, Taylor collects laser data and then goes to those locations to confirm the data is correct using a high end, handheld forestry laser. “After finding the top 50 of each target tree, I'll ground truth the top 10 of each species.” Taylor must confirm (ground-truth) that the laser data has accurately identified the species and its height. Some standard programs for processing this LiDAR data are ESRI/ArcGIS, LasTools and QGIS. To date, Taylor has over 200 terra bytes of processed LiDAR data stored on hard drive.

I asked Taylor if there was any field day that was particularly exciting or memorable to him. “Finding the 2nd tallest tree with Chris Atkins on July 1, 2006, and tallest tree, again with Chris Atkins, on August 26, 2006, was the high point of my journey; but I still craved finding more world record trees after that, so I moved on to other species. A recent one was when I went out with Tressa Gibbard from the Sugar Pine Foundation to Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park and confirmed a 100.2-meter Sitka spruce”. The closest height competitors to the coast redwood are Sitka spruce, Douglas fir and then Giant sequoia. To date, there are no modern records of any of these other non-coast redwoods over 100 meters (328.3 ft) until this 100.2-meter Sitka was confirmed. 100m which was once considered the unbreakable barrier for any tree other than coast redwood and eucalyptus.” Another story was about Jedediah Smith Redwoods in 1998, where Taylor and Stephan Sillett (associate professor at Cal Poly Humboldt) found the grove of titans in the center of the park. Taylor also found the tallest Sugar pine, which grows in Yosemite, at 274-feet.

I asked Taylor if there was a particular message he would want to send through his work, and he gave a very considerate and thought-provoking response: “When you have something that is at the ragged edge of existence, the trees are the absolute outliers. Statistically speaking, there are very few of them.” Taylor described the tallest trees with engineering terminology. “When you have something that’s silently pushing water up its structure to its maximum limit, you have something that is called a boundary condition. When that occurs, there is usually something there to be learned.” In engineering terms, a “boundary condition” can be defined as constraints that define how a system behaves at its boundaries. A “maximum limit” describes anything that would exist in an extreme state and in their most successful condition.

“These trees are so rare and exceptional that I would hope that the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service would be able and willing to protect them. When you look at tall trees, big trees, they inspire emotions in people, and it is common for tall trees to be engrained in your earliest childhood memories. They inspire awe in people, and the best examples should be saved like heritage trees.”

Big Tree Hunting Update