Invasive Caterpillar One More Problem For New Mexico's Reeling Conifer Forests

[hatrack]

On a Friday in February, John Formby drove up Hyde Park Road for a hike with his dogs. Rounding a curve about a mile before the Big Tesuque Campground, Formby spotted a large swath of conifers with a red tinge — a sign the trees’ needles were dying. “I felt there was just something unusual about it,” recalls Formby, an entomologist with New Mexico State Forestry and the person charged with heading the state’s forest health program.

The following day, he and two more insect scientists from the U.S. Forest Service hiked to the trees to investigate the cause of the needle kill. What they found was an infestation of Janet’s looper caterpillar, the latest addition to a growing list of deadly enemies of Santa Fe National Forest. Janet’s looper, which feeds on the needles of conifers, has been rarely identified in the wild and never this far north. For a bug guy like Formby, it was a major find.

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But the discovery was bittersweet for Formby. It meant yet another pest is at work on high-elevation trees in Santa Fe National Forest, an area that already has suffered grievous insect damage. The forest’s high-elevation trees have been increasingly ravaged in recent years by bark beetles, and much more damage is predicted because of warming temperatures and less snowpack due to climate change.

From 2013-17, tree mortality caused by Douglas-fir and spruce beetles was mapped on more than 133,000 acres of Santa Fe National Forest. Nearly half of the Pecos Wilderness has been hit by the beetles and other pests. The news only gets worse: The U.S. Forest Service says nearly 300,000 more acres across the 1.6 million-acre forest are at risk of significant tree loss by 2027, and scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have said it is highly likely New Mexico will lose the vast majority of its forests by 2050.

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http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/northern-new-mexico-forests-under-siege-by-destructive-insects/article_3d72b96f-5303-55a5-9ad3-023201950cbf.html

[BlueWI]

1. Sad news about a beautiful forest.

Wonder if any interventions are possible if funding or other support were available.