Ravenous pine beetles
According to an interview with the CBC given by Allan Carroll at Natural Resources Canada, there is not much hope of British Columbia containing the mountain pine beetles (Dendroctonus ponderosae) that have already killed 9.2 million acres of forest. He said that “Our estimates are that by about 2013 to 2015, the beetle will have killed about as much as 80% of the mature pine in the province and I don’t think we can really affect that now.” As the supply of Lodgepole Pine becomes eliminated, the beetles sometimes move on to Spruce and other species. If the beetles begin to target the Jack Pine of the boreal forest, Carroll says that it “could wipe out billions of trees all the way to the East Coast.”
These insects were mentioned here before, in the context of the effect of changing minimum temperatures on species ranges. Apparently, once they have reached their maximum cold tolerance, these beetles can endure temperatures of -40°C. It is significant cold events in the early and late winter – before their chemical defences have fully come on stream – that can lead to “very large amounts of mortality in the [beetle] population.” A few very crisp fall days would do a lot for western Canada’s forests.
August 15th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
“British Columbia has abundant amounts of mature lodgepole pine forests. These forests would normally be comprised of more tree variety and a more varied composition of tree ages. However, due to many decades of forest fire suppression, the stands are very uniform in age and species resulting in an expansive landscape of prime beetle habitat.”
Source: BC Government
Monocultured sections of replanted forest likely contribute as well.
August 15th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
Here is a high resolution map of the infestation (3 meg PDF).
August 18th, 2007 at 1:40 am
I did a class on advance spatial statistics (GIS) under Dr. Trisalyn Nelson. She and her SPAR Lab are doing some interesting research on the MPB problem that you should check out. My favourite study they did was painting hundred of pine beetles bright pink and releasing them to track their movements and look for any spatial patterns because they only have stand data and not landscape scale ideas of the processes involved with the epidemic. I was also taking a course in entomology at the time and so was heavily immersed in this topic. Not to mention my road trip up north through 100 Mile House, Prince George and also near the Morice forest district was quite astounding.
August 18th, 2007 at 1:42 am
Kate,
Front line data is always most appreciated. I am glad to see you are still reading this.
October 24th, 2007 at 7:38 am
[...] an ice cube seems like a good idea. That said, it has apparently been an unusually warm fall (bad news for the pine trees). Right now, it is 20°C outside, and it has been uncomfortably warm to bicycle uphill in a jacket [...]
December 17th, 2007 at 12:06 am
What is beetle probing?
By Padraic on work
Beetle probing is a seasonal occupation in the forestry industry that is a combination of surveying and pest control. It involves assessing which trees in a given area have been infested by the mountain pine beetle and is part of the ongoing effort to limit the extent of the beetle infestation (and the ecological and economic destruction it brings) in Western Canada.
To start, aircraft fly over pine forests and look for groups of red-needled trees of four or more. They mark GPS points for each of these sites. The job of the beetle prober is go to these sites (finding access via bush roads, pipelines, and walking) and set up a 50, 75 or 100 meter circle, then inspect every pine tree within this circle for signs of the beetle – stripped bark, red needles, and “pitch outs”, where sap has dripped out of the small holes left by beetles as they crawl into the pine bark…
January 17th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Federal and state forestry officials say that at current rates, the mountain pine beetle will likely kill the majority of Colorado’s large diameter lodgepole pine forests within the next three to five years. The outbreak has become a “top priority” for the Forest Service, in part because of increased risk of forest fires associated with the problem.
March 28th, 2008 at 10:13 am
After feast on B.C. forest, pine beetles face famine
IAN BAILEY
March 26, 2008
VANCOUVER — An end is in sight to British Columbia’s mountain pine beetle infestation, largely because the bugs have eaten through most of the trees that had sustained them.
March 28th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Beetle kill animated GIF
April 16th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
“With climate change, you need to have adaptive capacity and you don’t have adaptive capacity in sterile monocultures.”
April 26th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
[...] too long to act, potentially impossible to deal with. A new article in Nature suggests that the pine beetle epidemic in British Columbia has turned the forests there into net carbon emitters: In the team’s model, a [...]
August 25th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
stavrosthewonderchicken’s home is dying
By gen on canada
Canadian expatriate (and Metafilter member) stavrosthewonderchicken has a detailed and depressing look at the impact of the mountain pine beetle in Northern British Columbia, where a perfect storm of “forest fire suppression, clearcutting (and subsequent replanting), [and] global warming” has led to the destruction of over 130,000 square kilometers of forest.