1 Million Acres Of Lodgepole Forests Dead In CO, 3 Million Will Die, 22 Million Acres Across West

[hatrack]

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS - Mountain pine beetles are obliterating a forest that stretches from British Columbia to Mexico, and in the process are creating a hazard for fire, public safety and water supply. “What we’re looking at is an entire lodgepole pine forest dying right before our eyes,” said Gary Severson, executive director of the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments.

Severson described the problem to the Colorado Water Congress at its convention last week. The effects of the beetles were obvious to those who drove to the conference from any direction, with devastation ranging from small stands of red trees among the green in some places to whole scarred hillsides turning to gray.

So far, more than 1 million acres of lodgepole pines have been destroyed and another 3 million will be wiped out in Colorado. The damage so far is confined to 15 counties in the northwest part of the state, but is spreading over mountain ridges and moving southward. More than 22 million acres eventually will be destroyed in the American West. Meanwhile, the beetles are making their way across Canada toward the Atlantic Ocean as well.

The beetles are native, their cycles natural and their target specific: lodgepole pines. However, a combination of factors have made this infestation unprecedented in the scope of its damage, said Don Carroll, deputy supervisor of the White River National Forest. The lack of logging has created a higher proportion of large, older trees in the forests. They’re all about the same age and equally vulnerable. Drought has weakened the trees. The beetles have survived more easily through mild winters.


EDIT

http://www.chieftain.com/metro/1188194669/2

Hmm . . . hardly a word on warming in the entire article. Strange, huh?

[valerief]

1. How handy dandy for developers. nt

[havocmom]

2. And all the dead trees, left in the forests, mean bigger fires

[ShaneGR]

3. Buffer zones?

Since there isnt much that can be done in the short term concerning warming, maybe they need to create some buffer zones? Increase logging in the zones its spreading into to slow or stop the beetles movement?

[kestrel91316]

6. Yeah, they try to go in and log off all the dead standing trees, but

we are talking about MILLIONS of acres. They can't log them fast enough, and with the housing market dead, there's no buyers anyway would be my guess.

[GliderGuider]

7. won't work

The beetles spawn like mushroom spores. No kidding.
Great clouds of them puff up above the trees and are carried on the wind. That's how they got from BC to Alberta over the Rockies. We're looking at devastation all the way to Ontario and Québec within 10-15 years.
It takes a week of -40 to kill them off and the cold weather just isn't there anymore.

[GliderGuider]

4. This is devastating Canada too.

From early last year:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/28/AR2006022801772.html

QUESNEL, B.C. -- Millions of acres of Canada's lush green forests are turning red in spasms of death. A voracious beetle, whose population has exploded with the warming climate, is killing more trees than wildfires or logging.

The mountain pine beetle has infested an area three times the size of Maryland, devastating swaths of lodgepole pines and reshaping the future of the forest and the communities in it.

"It's pretty gut-wrenching," said Allan Carroll, a research scientist at the Pacific Forestry Centre in Victoria, whose studies tracked a lock step between warmer winters and the spread of the beetle. "People say climate change is something for our kids to worry about. No. It's now."

[AlecBGreen]

8. so true

"People say climate change is something for our kids to worry about. No. It's now."

[kestrel91316]

5. Hmm . . . hardly a word on warming in the entire article. Strange, huh?

It's sort of like the headshaking over the oceans' dead zones. Everybody acts like it's just some mysterious process that WE have nothing to do with. Or just God doing his thing because we haven't stoned all the gays or prayed enough to Jeebus.