After the particularly wet rainy season this past year, California is in the midst of a superbloom, an event where millions of dormant wildflower seeds across the state blossom in an awesome show of natural beauty. As visitors go out and witness this rare ecological event, some fear the effect they will have on these temporary environments.
“Overuse and over-visiting in off trails especially compacts soil and kills wildflowers and the seeds that would ideally have been produced that year,” said Joan Dudney, assistant professor of environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara. Dudney specializes in forest disturbance, seeing the effects of human activity on the environment.
“If they [nature parks] don’t have enough employees, protocols, and constraints in place to help guide traffic and where park visitors can go, then we start to see areas that are overrun with tourists wandering through fields, trampling all the wild flowers,” Dudney said. This, in turn, reduces the ability of these superblooms to occur again after big rainfall events, according to Dudney.