50% Of Marketable Trees In British Columbia Damaged Or Killed By Pine Beetles - 710 Million M3 Dead

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - About half of the marketable pine trees in West Coast Canadian province of British Columbia have been ravaged by a nearly decade-long beetle infestation, according to new government statistics.

The outbreak of mountain pine beetles has affected trees over an area of 13.5 million hectares (33.4 million acres) in the Western Canadian province, which is a major source of softwood lumber exports to the United States.

The insects have infested and killed about 710 million cubic meters of timber as of this month, up from 582 million cubic meters at the same time last year, according to a news release posted on the province's Web site.

The tiny black beetles lay their eggs in the lodgepole and ponderosa pines with the hungry larvae killing the trees by destroying their ability to take in water and nutrients. They also carry a fungus that stains the wood blue.

EDIT

http://www.enn.com/wildlife/article/33558

...combined with overstocking forests. Dense stands of prime Dendroctonus and Ips beetle habitat in stressed condition. It's not like we don't know the correct prescription for this-- or at least one step in that direction-- it's just that most folks don't want to accept the bitter medicine.

Let it burn.

I agree with your assessment that improper forest stewardship contributed to this problem.

Im not so sure that burning 33.4 million acres of infested pine trees would help the environment. Thats an area of forest bigger than Pennsylvania!

No, burning it all it once isn't a great idea-- at the very least such fires would likely be stand replacing in much of the forest at this point-- but dramatic thinning and return to natural fire ecology is the ONLY lasting solution. Mountain pine beetle outbreaks are a fact of life in western conifer forests, but outbreaks are generally limited when tree densities are much lower and fire maintained.

in any predator/prey relationship, a dramatic swing one way will followed by a dramatic counterswing favoring the other. So, if beetle populations skyrocket and destroy 90% of the soft pine in BC, ok, tough **** for them. As the pines die out, the beetle population should collapse and the pines will come back. Because of global climate change, this return by the pines will most likely not be to its original numbers, but instead balance to a new equilibrium.

...one of the same ecosystem services that fire normally provides. They're creating mosaics of uneven aged stands, and even performing wholesale stand replacement, just like we'd mostly get from wildfire at this point. Frankly, I don't think the beetles are nearly as destructive as they're made out to be, unless one is in the timber extraction business, of course. Their "destruction" is the result of ecosystem disturbance, fire suppression in this case, and it ultimately helps restore healthy ecosystems. All the fuel that results from beetle outbreaks will BURN, increasing the likelihood of a return to the natural fire cycle.

BTW, we're seeing exactly the same thing playing out in Colorado and Wyoming, too.

http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/HFP/mountain_pine_beetle/bbbrochure.htm


Mountain Pine Beetle in B.C.
A Growing Problem

The mountain pine beetle is just over six millimetres long (about the size of a grain of rice). But the tiny forest insect has infested huge areas of mature pine around the interior of British Columbia, causing colossal amounts of damage on B.C. forests.

The beetle likes mature pine and mild weather. Because B.C. has more old pine than ever before, and has had several consecutive mild winters, mountain pine beetle populations have exploded to epidemic levels.

<snip>

Cold is the Best Control Agent

There’s one thing that really stops the beetle dead – freezing temperatures. Sudden cold snaps (-25 degrees C) in the early fall or late spring, or sustained frigid weather (less than -40 degrees C) in the winter can kill populations of beetles, and help end serious outbreaks.

However Mother Nature has not been co-operative the last several years. Successive hot, dry summers combined with mild winters in much of central B.C. have allowed the beetle to multiply, and even expand its range to areas that were once historically too cold for the insect to survive.

It is impossible for human intervention to halt the beetle epidemic in its tracks at this stage in the infestation. Until the epidemic ends, British Columbia must work together to slow and contain the spread of the infestation, and lessen the associated threats to the province’s economic well-being.

...but again, that brood that isn't being killed is only there in the first place because there are WAY too many over-stressed trees available. Cold weather can end an outbreak, but fire suppression and overstocking create the conditions that initiate outbreaks.

The warmer winters might also be correlated with increased tree moisture stess-- I don't know whether anyone has looked at this in BC yet-- but that is another contributing factor in tree susceptibility to Dendroctonus beetle attack.

so come visit our beautiful state before our landscape is devastated.

http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7009721921

...in much of the colorado rockies. Get good fire insurance.

for a while now. Massive die off of pines. I was told the trees were stressed due to the warm temps. That allowed the pine beetle numbers to soar. 15 years ago when we lived at 6500 ft elevation in the Black Hills the summers were not so warm. We had no frogs or snakes as it was to cold.I remember my daughter wedding on June 17,1994 and passing out jackets and sweatshirts to visitors at our home. I also remember 4 of July's in Custer wearing a down coat and covering with a down comforter and still freezing.
That has all changed now. We sold and move . After the 87000 acre Jasper fire came .5 miles from our place, wells were drying up, springs drying up, we thought it time to go.

Tree susceptibility to bark beetle attack is primarily determined by two factors: tree stress and attack density, i.e. number of attacking beetles during the relatively short initial attack. We can examine each of these factors independently, but remember that they operate in concert.

Tree stress results from lots of different causes. The most common are excessive density (crowding, overstocking stands), water stress, and disease, usually fungal pathogens. All three of these stressors operate independently and synergistically, e.g. overcrowding exacerbates water stress in many cases through competition for water in the root zone. Fungal hyphae block water conducting cells in the sapwood and also exacerbate water stress. Water stress, in turn, diminishes trees' defensive response, which is to exude copious amounts of toxic resin.

Beetle density is harder to get a handle on. Bark beetle populations apparently cycle naturally with peaks *approximately* every eleven years or so, but there's a huge amount of variability-- enough to make the accuracy of the apparent cycling questionable. Host tree abundance and susceptibility is without doubt one of the major factors triggering population increase. Winter severity certainly influences brood mortality (during winter the last brood remain entombed under the bark of already killed trees for protection).

Warm temps are not necessarily all good for the beetles, however-- beetle mortality is high when adults are flying between host trees seeking new hosts, and it gets higher as temperatures rise. On the other hand, warm temperatures allow beetle brood populations to develop faster, and they improve survivorship of the brood, up to a point. Warm temperatures also increase tree stress by increasing evapotranspiration rate, which ups water stress and also forces trees to close their stomates for longer periods during the day, limiting photosynthesis and making trees more susceptible to beetle attack.

Time and again, the best environmental correlations with beetle outbreaks involve tree density, especially in western forests where fire suppression has so dramatically changed forest structure during the last hundred years, often along with other stressors like lightning strikes or other wounding, water stress, fungal diseases, and so on. Other stressors usually work in concert with overstocking to produce ticking time bombs of stands just filled with highly susceptible trees. Such stands support the initial stages of huge population outbreaks-- beetle population regulation begins to respond to POSITIVE feedbacks in those situations and populations explode.

What's happening with sudden oak death? :shrug:

In that case, the trees ARE heavily stressed, but much of that comes from management of the forest for timber production. Check out the Illingworth photo couplets here. You'll notice that prior to European settlement and disruption of both the fire and beetle cycles, there is much less standing timber, and much of it is standing dead timber. That is not to say it wasn't a healthy forest...those snags are (were) critical habitat for various fungi, insects, woodpeckers, and bats, and after they fall they become important habitat for various small mammals and previously were food sources for bears, and then if the wood is subsequently washed into streams it becomes an important habitat for fish and aquatic invertebrates.

When the consensus view shifted to fire exclusion for economic gain, clearcutting replaced fire and beetles as top down control on tree stocking, but did so in a way that didn't allow for snag function in the ecosystem, ruined soils, and disrupted nutrient flow across entire watersheds. It also provided a stable setting for homesteaders to build cabins, and their descendants to build trophy homes, up under the trees, without fear of what were previously frequent fires, usually ground fires but occasionally (you can see the mosaic pattern in some of the old photos) mixed severity or stand replacing fires.

So now instead of frequent fires and relatively small-scale beetle outbreaks, there are infrequent and much larger fires and outbreaks that spread to healthy trees further away from what would historically have been the impact zone. Coupled with cessation of large-scale logging, overstocked conditions are apparent all over the forest. Add to the mix warmer winters that no longer effectively control the beetle larvae in the trees, and that is one explosive situation. If I bought property in the Hills, I'd quickly thin the basal coverage to our best estimate of historic conditions by selectively removing the small tree and saplings first, trim any low-hanging branches from the bigger trees, and assuming my property abutted Forest Service or Park Service property, work with them to run some controlled burns through the area to decrease the fire risk as much as possible. At least that way I'd favor ground fires near the house, and if a running crown fire did roar toward me, there would be at least a chance at creating a defensible area by cutting a relatively few large trees in a hurry.

A couple other things to consider:
1. If BC winters no longer effectively control Dendroctonus ponderosae, and it can infest trees common in the boreal forest, what's to stop them from spreading to occupy new niches across the continent to Nova Scotia, and down into the Appalachians?
2. As people continue building in the WUI and expect that Federal agency firefighters will protect their property, at what point does the Fed start dropping the cost on counties, cities, and towns to pay for their own poor zoning decisions?
3. With catastrophic fires looking likely across rather large acreages of now overstocked, beetle-killed timber, and a rapidly warming climate changing the precipitation patterns among these western forests, what sorts of forest assemblages can we look forward to over the next 50 or so years?
4. As large, hot fires tend to burn off duff and expose mineral soil, and invasive species like cheatgrass, brooms, various thistles, knotweed, and tamarisk like to colonize sites like that, are we going to continue to seek control of those species or just give up?

I think all told, we've screwed with so many variables in most of these systems before we even bothered to understand how the systems work that we might as well expect a big infestation and/or burn, and view whatever grows next as the new normal.