Now is the time to address mountain pine beetle infestations
By PERRY BACKUS
Some of the oldest pines on the campus of Montana State University are dead but they don’t know it yet.
“They look green now, but by next spring they will be rust red,” said MSU Arborist Rod Walters. “My whole career has been about trees. I don’t like cutting them down, but it’s what we have to do if we want any chance of saving the rest.”
The college plans to cut as many as 200 mountain pine beetle infested pines down this winter.
The school is not alone.
Mountain pine beetles are eating their way through forests across the West. An estimated 3.9 million acres have been infested in Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, Oregon, Idaho, Utah and Washington.
From British Columbia, where the mountain pine beetle has killed $50 billion worth of forest in less than a decade, Forestry Consultant Don Fowler said Montanans need to act soon to protect trees in their own backyard.
“I live in BC where 40-plus million acres are infested,” he said. “I would like to think we have learned a thing or two about mountain pine beetles along the way.”
Fowler contacted the Ravalli Republic this week after reading an article on the newspaper’s Web site on the continuing spread of beetle infestation across the state. The 50-year-old Fowler said he’s been developing integrated pest management plans addressing bark beetle infestations for most of his working career. A company that sells a pheromone called Verenone that’s designed to fool beetles into bypassing non-infected trees pays his bills.
In British Columbia, Fowler said the battle against the beetles on a forest landscape level is lost. The focus now is on saving trees on private landowner’s properties.
Montanans looking to protect their own valuable pine trees from this year’s crop of pine beetles need to take action soon. One way to slow the beetles’ spread is to disrupt its lifecycle by cutting trees under attack from last year’s beetle crop before the next generation of insects can emerge and do more damage, Fowler said.
Female mountain pine beetles bore into the tree’s inner bark n called the cambium n which acts as the tree’s circulatory system. Once inside, they bore vertical tunnels under the bark before emitting a pheromone to attract males for mating. The pheromone also attracts females, which in turn causes a mass attack on the tree.
After mating, the females lay eggs which hatch into larvae within a few weeks. The larvae feed on the host tree in the spring after the temperature warms. They tunnel mostly horizontal galleries, which girdle the tree and eventually kill it.
The larvae emerge as adult beetles to fly to new trees in both mid-June and late August.
In order to stop that cycle, heavily invested trees have to be cut down and destroyed, Fowler said.
“It’s not good enough to cut them up for firewood,” he said. “I’ve seen the beetles emerging from (tree) cookies and go on to attack more trees. Cutting the trees down is just half the battle.”
Landowners hoping to slow the beetle advance need to burn, chip or remove the bark from infested trees to kill the larvae.
The easiest way to find what Fowler calls “green attack trees” is to look for the telltale pitch tubes that appear on the tree’s trunk as popcorn-shaped nodules. Trees under attack by beetles attempt to fight off the attack by excreting sap.
Other indicators of attack are frass (sawdust and beetle poop) found along the tree’s bark, a visible fading of the tree’s needles and possibly birds attracted to the larvae under the tree’s bark.
Fowler helps landowners developed integrated pest management plans to help ward off the insects. He’ll speak at the Association of Montana Turf, Ornamental and Pest Professionals annual meeting in Helena on Jan. 26th.
“One size doesn’t fit all,” he said. “You have to take into consideration a person’s budget, expectations and environmental considerations when developing an integrated pest management plan.”
For people attempting to protect small groves of trees, a product called Verbenone mimics the pheromone released by the female beetles when an infested tree is full. Other beetles sense the chemical message and might bypass a tree they would normally attack.
Pesticides can be used to kill the beetles, but they have their own issues.
“They kill all the beneficial insects as well,” Fowler said. “Pesticides can be really hard on honey bees.”
Broad spectrum pesticides are probably best used to protect high value trees that a landowner wants to make sure survive beetle attacks, he said.
Keeping trees healthy through regular watering is also a good tactic to keep pine beetles at bay.
Mountain pine beetles have forever been eating their way through forests, but not in the numbers seen today.
“The first big known outbreak in B.C. happened in 1910 and there have been four big ones since,” Fowler said. “The largest occurred in the early 1980s when over 600,000 acres were infested. We thought back then ‘wow, this is really big.’”
Two cold winters later and the population of beetles dropped significantly.
Today, in British Columbia, almost 40 million acres have been impacted by the beetle.
“It’s huge beyond belief,” Fowler said. “The only way you can really comprehend it is to see it from the air.”
Something changed to make the conditions just right for the explosion of pine beetle populations.
Fowler said the simple answer is climate and food.
Decades of fighting wildfire created a sea of same aged older forest that provides perfect food for the beetles. Years of drought weakened the trees enough to allow the beetles a food hold. And temperatures haven’t plunged far below zero for weeks on end to slow their advance.
“Once the beetles reach an epidemic stage, it’s too late,” Fowler said.
In British Columbia, the forestry landscape level battle is irrevocably lost and there will be profound and long lasting implications to communities for years to come, he said.
“There have been 50 mill closures and still counting,” Fowler said. “Not all are related to the mountain pine beetle. It has a lot to do with the American economy as well.”
People living the Rocky Mountain West will feel the impacts of the mountain pine beetle infestation for generations to come.
“This will be the most significant environmental event that happens in our lifetime,” Fowler said. “The folks in Colorado are already feeling the impacts in air quality and changes in the way the snowpack melts … the kinds of changes that will occur from such a dramatic change in forested lands is endless.
“The beetles never cease to amaze me,” he said. “You can have hectares of spruce and fir and one pine. They’ll search it out and kill it.”
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farmerziffel wrote on Jan 3, 2009 2:38 AM:
a wrote on Jan 2, 2009 3:32 PM:
chicagotribune.com
Canada's forests, once huge help on greenhouse gases, now contribute to climate change
Canada's vast forests, once huge absorbers of greenhouse gases, now add to problem
By Howard Witt
Tribune correspondent
January 2, 2009
VANCOUVER As relentlessly bad as the news about global warming seems to be, with ice at the poles melting faster than scientists had predicted and world temperatures rising higher than expected, there was at least a reservoir of hope stored here in Canada's vast forests.
The country's 1.2 million square miles of trees have been dubbed the "lungs of the planet" by ecologists because they account for more than 7 percent of Earth's total forest lands. They could always be depended upon to suck in vast quantities of carbon dioxide, naturally cleansing the world of much of the harmful heat-trapping gas.
But not anymore.
In an alarming yet little-noticed series of recent studies, scientists have concluded that Canada's precious forests, stressed from damage caused by global warming, insect infestations and persistent fires, have crossed an ominous line and are now pumping out more climate-changing carbon dioxide than they are sequestering.
Worse yet, the experts predict that Canada's forests will remain net carbon sources, as opposed to carbon storage "sinks," until at least 2022, and possibly much longer.
"We are seeing a significant distortion of the natural trend," said Werner Kurz, senior research scientist at the Canadian Forest Service and the leading expert on carbon cycles in the nation's forests. "Since 1999, and especially in the last five years, the forests have shifted from being a carbon sink to a carbon source."
Translation: Earth's lungs have come down with emphysema. Canada's forests are no longer our friends.
So serious is the problem that Canada's federal government effectively wrote off the nation's forests in 2007 as officials submitted their plans to abide by the international Kyoto Protocol, which obligates participating governments to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
Under the Kyoto agreement, governments are permitted to count forest lands as credits, or offsets, when calculating their national carbon emissions. But Canadian officials, aware of the scientific studies showing that their forests actually are emitting excess carbon, quietly omitted the forest lands from their Kyoto compliance calculations.
"The forecast analysis prepared for the government ... indicates there is a probability that forests would constitute a net source of greenhouse gas emissions," a Canadian Environment Ministry spokesman told the Montreal Gazette.
Canadian officials say global warming is causing the crisis in their forests. Inexorably rising temperatures are slowly drying out forest lands, leaving trees more susceptible to fires, which release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.
Higher temperatures also are accelerating the spread of a deadly pest known as the mountain pine beetle, which has devastated pine forests across British Columbia and is threatening vital timber in the neighboring province of Alberta. More than 50,000 square miles of British Columbia's pine forest have been stricken so far with the telltale markers of death: needles that turn bright red before falling off the tree.
Bitter cold Canadian winters used to kill off much of the pine beetle population each year, naturally keeping it in check. But the milder winters of recent years have allowed the insect to proliferate.
"That's what's causing some of our forests to switch from a carbon sink position to a source position," said Jim Snetsinger, British Columbia's chief forester. "Once those infested trees are killed by the pine beetle, they are no longer sequestering carbonthey are giving it off."
Snetsinger noted that eventually, over the course of a generation, some of the dying forests will begin to regenerate and once again begin storing more carbon than they release. But for the foreseeable future, experts say, their models show that Canada's forests will stay stuck in a vicious global-warming cycle, both succumbing to the effects of climate change and, as they decay and release more carbon, helping to accelerate it.
That grim reality is stoking a new debate over commercial logging, one of Canada's biggest industries.
Environmentalists contend that the extreme stresses on Canada's forests, particularly the old-growth northern forest, mean that logging ought to be sharply curtailed to preserve the remaining treesand the carbon stored within themfor as long as possible.
Moreover, they argue that the disruptive process of logging releases even more carbon stored in the forest peat, threatening to set off what they describe as a virtual "carbon bomb"the estimated 186 billion tons of carbon stored in Canada's forests, which is equivalent to 27 years worth of global carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
"There's only one thing which hauls all that carbon out of the forest, and that's logging," said Merran Smith, director of the climate program at the environmental group ForestEthics. "What we need to do is maintain as much biodiversity as we can, so we are prepared to adapt as temperatures change, so we have resilience."
But Kurz and other government scientists contend that a logging moratorium is no solution to the global warming problem and would in fact increase carbon emissions over the long term.
That's because, they argue, essential wood products for construction, furniture and other uses would have to be replaced with other man-made materials, such as plastic, steel or concrete, which require the burning of even more fossil fuelsand therefore carbon emissionsduring their manufacturing process.
"It's not as simple as saying, 'Log less and therefore have more carbon sequestered in the forests,' " Kurz said. "That is true, but if in order to do that you have more fossil fuel emitted elsewhere, your impact on the climate may be negative."
Instead, some scientists argue for more extensive logging of the remaining commercial forests so that older forest stands, which are most vulnerable to insect infestations and have nearly reached their carbon-storage capacity, can be replanted with younger trees that will take in even more carbon during their growing years.
hwitt@tribune.com
Copyright 2009, Chicago Tribune "
a wrote on Jan 2, 2009 2:53 PM:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-canada-trees_wittjan02,0,539661.story "
Matthew Koehler wrote on Jan 2, 2009 11:24 AM:
"While the current infestation will certainly change forests across Montana, Greg DeNitto [group leader of the Forest Services Northern Regions forest health protection team], said its not something that hasnt happened before. 'Weve seen similar levels of infestation in the 1970s and 80s and also back in the 20s and 30s,' Denitto said. 'Its not something thats unprecedented.'
Yet in this article today the same author wrote, "Mountain pine beetles have forever been eating their way through forests, but not in the numbers seen today."
How can a week ago the situation be "similar to past infestations" and "not unprecedented", yet today the beetle numbers are higher than ever? Perhaps it has to do with the fact that the guy quoted in today's article makes his living off selling products to people to counter the beetles?
Anyway, for a more comprehensive look at the beetle issue check out a report titled, "Recent Forest Insect Outbreaks and Fire Risk in Colorado Forests: A Brief Synthesis of Relevant Research."
It's available at: http://www.cfri.colostate.edu/docs/cfri_insect.pdf
The report, from some of the leading independent researchers on the topic, answers many common questions such as:
Do outbreaks of mountain pine beetles and other forest insects increase the risk of severe wildfires? Does a large insect outbreak constitute an emergency? Are forests with large amounts of insects and dead trees unhealthy?
Some of the answers may surprise people. "