Bark Beetles Will Kill Most Of Colorado's Mature Lodgepoles In 3-5 Years - State Control Neededl

[hatrack]

Foresters say beetles will kill most of Colorado's mature lodgepole pine forests in the next three to five years. That's most. More than a half-million new acres were ravaged by this pest in 2007.

It's sobering news and not just for aesthetic reasons. The death of these forests will increase fire hazards. Dead trees mean more erosion, and loose dirt will clog the mountain runoff that provides the vast majority of drinking water for the inland West. Something must be done.

The good news is that mitigation efforts have been under way for some years as the beetle problem has emerged. The bad news is that given the rapid progression of the infestation, the scope of such efforts aren't likely to be broad enough. This problem needs to move up on the public priority list.

As the situation worsens, we hope state and federal lawmakers, in conjunction with foresters, will come up with a priority list of problem areas, solutions and detailed cost estimates. Rick Cables, regional forester for the U.S. Forest Service's Rocky Mountain region, said thinning efforts and prescribed burns would protect homes and high-value recreation areas. Existing programs could be ramped up in scale if they had more resources, he said.

EDIT

http://www.denverpost.com/editorials/ci_7971171

[IndyOp]

1. Bark beetles. Big deal. What with the climate crisis and all bark beetles don't seem important...

Oh, wait... :eyes:

[msongs]

2. maybe when their food source dies, the infestation will die and NEW kinds of trees move in nt

[malakai2]

3. That's what 150 years of forest mismanagement will do

First the Euro settlers move in and clearcut anything merchantable. What was once an uneven-age stand mosaic created largely by a dynamic relationship between the tree species, fire, insects, and climate becomes a dense regrowth of a few age classes. As the trees grow, fire and insects begin to do their thing, and create a new mosaic of forest types. The Euro settlers' descendants find this inconvenient, and eliminate fire from the landscape. Then they plant monocultures of single tree species in even-age stands, and use pesticides and clearcutting to control insects to the extend possible. All the while, these descendants do nothing to thin small trees, leading to overstocked conditions of highly stressed trees that are highly susceptible to insects. Insects then begin to attack these stands, millions of acres at a time. All the while, those Euro settlers and their descendants have been making the climate warmer, thus making fire conditions more severe year by year.

Then, as the insect and climate issues come to a head, a new class of descendants move into the danger area under the bug infected, overstocked, fire susceptible trees, in a landscape that has missed anywhere from one to fifteen burn cycles. Their presence forecloses on the possibility of returning fire to the landscape as a management tool. Except now, the climate has so changed that fire and insects can't be contained as before. In fact, insect ranges move northward far enough that western mountain species reach the boreal forest in Canada, and nothing now prevents all these issues from moving eastward across a huge swath of Canada, into the pine forests of the Great Lakes, New England, the Appalachians, and ultimately the southeastern pine forests.

And to think, the alarm on so many of these issues was raised long ago. Nobody listened then, and nobody is really listening now.