VANCOUVER—Dead, rusty brown, dried-up cedar trees are an increasingly common sight in Metro Vancouver and across southwestern B.C., and experts say it’s a visible sign of climate change.

Nick Page, a biologist with Raincoast Applied Ecology who lives on Bowen Island, has dead Western red cedars in his backyard, and says it’s due to a drier climate with longer periods of drought.

“They turn kind of an orange colour from top to bottom, and they’re not recovering from that. That’s mortality.” he said.

Page travels the province for his job with a Vancouver-based ecological consulting company, and first started seeing this phenomenon in the fall of 2018. He said it’s a “persistent and widespread decline, including death” of red cedars aged five to 100 years old.

He’s also seeing other signs of stress including overproduction of cones and what’s called “top dieback,” where the top branches turn orange.

The stress and deaths are a sign of recurring summer drought, Page said, noting the trees didn’t get enough water during extremely dry summers in 2015, 2017 and 2018.

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“It gets to the point where they can’t recover anymore, and basically the next drought results in the death of the tree.”

Across the water from Bowen Island at the University of British Columbia, Douglas Justice, the associate director of Horticulture & Collections at the UBC Botanical Garden, sees dead red cedars around the Point Grey campus.

They’re a constant reminder of the earth’s rapidly changing climate.

“This area of southwestern B.C. and the southeastern part of Vancouver Island, we’re really just at the tipping point,” he said.

“Summer droughts were a month or two in the past and now they’re becoming two months to three months ... we’re sort of getting more of a California climate.”

The dead trees have been spotted down the hill from the university in Jericho Park, across the water at West Vancouver’s Lighthouse Park and Rockridge Secondary School and in Parksville on Vancouver Island.

The Western red cedar is common on B.C’s coast, the interior wet belt on southeastern mountain slopes, and in pockets of north-central B.C. near Prince George. It’s the province’s official tree and holds particular significance for many coastal First Nations, since its lightweight, rot-resistant wood is often used to make dugout canoes and build houses.

Justice said it’s hard to save the trees once they start to die.

“The problem with Western red cedar is that when you see them struggling, the time to water (them) was probably two years ago. There’s a huge lag time, so it’s very very hard to kind of mitigate the problem.”

Not all red cedars are in trouble, just the ones that grow in dry areas like south-facing slopes or in rocky soil that doesn’t hold moisture.

“We see the healthy ones, but who knows what they’re going to look like in two to three years,” Justice said.

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Both Justice and Page say Grand fir trees are also showing signs of stress, with patches of orange branches.

“I predict this is a bit of a canary in the coal mine,” Page said. “These are the early stages of what we predict in terms of the climate-change effects on forests.”

A drastically changed forest will make urban and rural forests more susceptible to fires, Page explained, and decrease biodiversity.

“In places that have a mix of a forest now, there may be transition to fir or pine trees or something that’s more tolerant of these conditions. It could be a more rapid change than people have anticipated.”

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