Pine Beetles Eat Colorado
At a Denver news conference yesterday the US Forest Service announced findings that “mountain pine beetles will kill the majority of Colorado’s large-diameter lodgepole pine forests within three to five years.”
From the Denver Post [here]
Beetle-kill rate in Colorado “catastrophic”
By Howard Pankratz, The Denver Post
GOLDEN — Federal and state forestry officials say that at current rates, mountain pine beetles will kill the majority of Colorado’s large-diameter lodgepole pine forests within three to five years.
In a news conference this morning, Regional Forester Rick Cables and Jeff Jahnke, the Colorado State Forester, announced the results of the 2007 aerial survey of the state’s forests.
The survey concluded that the beetle infestation claimed 500,000 new acres of trees last year, bringing the total number of acres up to 1.5 million since the first sign of the outbreak in 1996.
Officials described the infestation as a “catastrophic event” that has now crossed into Front Range areas.
“Dead and dying trees that were isolated to five northern Colorado counties last year can now be seen in some Front Range areas, as well as southern Wyoming,” Cables said in a statement released at the U.S. Forest Service regional office in Golden.
“The bark infestation has spread dramatically,” he said. “This is an unprecedented event.”…
But there is no way to stop the beetles, and he anticipated that the forests would soon mirror those of Yellowstone National Park after fires swept through in 1988.
He said that areas full of dead trees would be susceptible to fires for the next 15 or 20 years.
He was optimistic, however, that those areas would regenerate. He said that within 10 years, there should be a carpet of lodgepole saplings about waist high.
That sounds like a “pygmy” forest (I hope no one is offended, because that’s the authentic term-of-art). I have seen lodgepole thickets 3 feet tall and 50 years old. Thousands of LP stems per acre, all the same age, often leads to the situation where none of them grow.
The Denver Post has a forum, and some of the comments on the above article are pretty good [here].
The Coloradoan reported the story as well [here]:
Pine beetles cause need for funds
By Trevor Hughes, The Coloradoan
Most of the mature lodgepole pine trees in Colorado will likely be dead within five years, federal and state officials said on Monday, revealing that an “epidemic” of mountain pine beetles is destroying the state’s forests.
“This is a huge, unprecedented event,” said Rick Cables, Rocky Mountain regional forester for the U.S. Forest Service.
The death of the state’s mature mountain forests has major implications for wildfires in and around mountain communities, for drinking water that will get polluted by ash from those wildfires and for the state’s tourism-dependent economy.
Monday’s announcement drew concern from members of the state’s congressional delegation who said they will seek additional federal funding to find solutions and take precautions.
And today the Coloradoan reported that funds have been secured already [here]
Allard secures $12M in federal funding for pine beetle control
By Coloradoan staffU.S. Sen. Wayne Allard announced today he has secured $12 million in federal funding to address the bark beetle epidemic in Colorado.
Of the $12 million, $8 million will be utilized by the Forest Service to address the bark beetle epidemic in the Rocky Mountain region and $4 million will be provided in the form of grants for hazardous fuel reduction projects on state or private land.
Allard’s staff issued a press release today, a day after federal and state officials announced the mountain pine beetles will likely kill off nearly every mature lodgepole pine in Colorado over the next three to five years.
Twelve million dollars spread over 1.5 million acres is $8 per acre. That and a debit card will buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks. How those funds will be spent is one question. How they should be spent, that is, what’s the best course of action now, is another question entirely.
The high density of even-aged, over-stocked, beetle-susceptible lodgepole pine forests that make up so much of Colorado are unprecedented in history, and prehistory, in Colorado. For the last 10,000 years the indigenous residents of Colorado have applied frequent, regular, seasonal fires to the landscape for a variety of reasons, most related to the sustinence and survival advantages that accrued.
Frequent, regular, seasonal fires led to open, park-like forests, as well as high prairies and mountain meadows almost entirely devoid of trees.
In the late 1800’s the indigenous residents were removed or otherwise impeded from setting stewardship fires. In the absence of fires lodgepole pine thickets arose. After 80 to 120 years, the lodgepole pine trees have reached the over-mature stage and become inviting targets for beetle infestations.
Now the piper has come home to roost, so to speak.
What should be done next? This is an important question, but before I address it, I must make the point that the lack of proper forest management led to the problem. As a pro forester, it grieves me to be called in after-the-fact-post-mortem and be asked, “Now what?” Maybe if people had been listening 10, 15, 20+ years ago, we wouldn’t be in the current pickle.
And that’s saying it very nicely, not my usual way.
Here’s the only thing that can be done now: strip the dead trees off the landscape and sell them for whatever we can get for them. Then burn it. Then burn it again. Then burn it again. The goal should be to eliminate the lodgepole pine (and Gambel oak) and induce native grasses, forbs, bulbs, and other prairie plants. Keep the burning going, year after year, in the fall when conditions are right. Eventually an open, park-like forest of ponderosa pines (with a few lodgepoles and spruces) will arise.
That’s the basic plan. It could be enhanced by strategic burning to restore clonal aspen stands, berry fields, and other features of the native historical landscape. Tree seedlings (not lodgepole) could be also planted, although it is hard to protect them while frequently burning the lodgepole thickets.
If there are any stands that haven’t been infested, they could be thinned and the thinnings burned immediately. Bark beetles will breed in downed logs and slash. But that probably won’t be sufficiently prophylactic now, given that the bark beetle populations have exploded. Some efforts apparently have been made to spray insecticides, but that’s not going to work either. If the infestations were isolated and localized, maybe spraying would have some temporary damping effect, but not now.
In the long run, the best solution is to restore (create, induce, chum) a more historically appropriate and sustainable landscape, one that persists without catastrophic insect irruptions, whole forest die-offs, megafires, and all the other unintended consequences of “unmanagement.”
