Thanks To Pine Beetle, Western Forest "Resetting Itself On A Landscape Scale" - CSM

[hatrack]

EDIT

This color is becoming increasingly common in northern Colorado and throughout the West as the tiny beetle lays waste to vast swaths of vulnerable lodgepole pine forests, typically monocultures of trees that are weakened by drought and are all about the same mature age – perfect fodder for the voracious beetle. The destruction, which has killed millions of lodgepole pines in Colorado alone, will alter the look of the landscape and is a risk to local economies that depend on mountain tourism. It's also prompting a major response because of concerns about the threat to life and property from falling trees, as well as the increased risk of wildfire.

"The forest is resetting itself on a landscape scale," says Jim Maxwell, a US Forest Service spokesman for the Rocky Mountain region. "It's not like they've come in like a plague of locusts: They're residents of the forest, and in normal times, they perform a benefit to the forest by thinning out weak and sickly trees. But now it's an epidemic.... It wouldn't be nearly as much of a concern as it is if we didn't have communities built up into the forests and local economies dependent on the forest."

Pine beetles – and other bark beetles that have been attacking trees such as spruce and subalpine fir – are hardly new to the ecosystem. What's made them so potent this time around, say scientists, is a combination of factors: warmer winters that have helped the beetles multiply, drought that has weakened the trees' natural defenses, and, primarily, millions of acres of less-diverse forests that are all maturing about the same time. Pine beetles typically attack trees more than 80 or 100 years old and more than six inches in diameter. Many Western lodgepole forests are reaching that state simultaneously, since huge areas of forest were cut down in the late 1800s for mining operations, and in recent years, fire has been suppressed. The result is pine-beetle devastation on a scale that's never been seen in the recorded history of the West.

A report earlier this month from the Colorado State Forest Service determined that about 660,000 acres of lodgepole forests – more than 40 percent of Colorado's total – were infested in 2006, and about four times as many trees were killed per acre than in the previous year. The scale is such that nothing can be done to change the outcome significantly. Over the course of the next few decades, experts say, large tracts will turn red, then gray. Eventually the dead trees will fall and new ones will spring up.

EDIT

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0222/p01s01-usgn.html

[redqueen]

1. Warmer winters and drought will probably cause so much more

havoc, along with every other kind of climate change... I keep getting that BTO song in my head. *sigh*

[NMDemDist2]

2. i wonder if this will make room for more deciduous trees?

warmer winters and less snow pack will invite oaks and other trees to fill the gaps

:shrug:

[xchrom]

3. it might except their tree line cut off

is probably a good deal lower than pine trees.

winters might be drier in the mountains -- but they will still be very windy and cold.

i'm wondering if we are creating an environment for fewer trees in the mountain western states period?

[XemaSab]

4. The western mountains have too many trees in them already

Ditto for the western foothills and coastal forests.





Things like sudden oak death and the pine beetle infestation are problems created by overpopulation. Thinning and fire restoration NEED to happen, or we risk losing hundreds of thousands of acres of forest to catastrophic fires.

[xchrom]

5. i agree one hundred percent about the fire thing.

the far western landscape is a landscape shaped by fire -- as much a part of the environment as rain or sun.