Wildfires torched up to a fifth of all giant sequoia trees

By BRIAN MELLEY
Associated Press

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Sequoia National Park says lightning-sparked wildfires in the past two years have killed a minimum of nearly 10,000 giant sequoia trees in California. The estimate released Friday accounts for 13% to 19% of native sequoias that are the largest trees on Earth. The trees are reliant on periodic low-intensity fire and were once seen as fire-resistant. But fires that have become more severe as climate change has brought hotter droughts and fires have torn through dozens of groves in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the past six years, killing the giants in large numbers for the first time. Extraordinary firefighting measures this year helped save some of the giants.