Cause and effect, or correlation not causation?
Press release Via Eurekalert:
Climate change causing demise of lodgepole pine in western North America
CORVALLIS, Ore. – Lodgepole pine, a hardy tree species that can thrive in cold temperatures and plays a key role in many western ecosystems, is already shrinking in range as a result of climate change – and may almost disappear from most of the Pacific Northwest by 2080, a new study concludes.
Including Canada, where it is actually projected to increase in some places, lodgepole pine is expected to be able to survive in only 17 percent of its current range in the western parts of North America.
The research, just published in the journal Climatic Change, was done by scientists from the College of Forestry at Oregon State University and the Department of Forest Resource Management at the University of British Columbia. It was based on an analysis of 12,600 sites across a broad geographic range.
Lodgepole pine ecosystems occupy large areas following major fires where extreme cold temperatures, poor soils and heavy, branch-breaking snows make it difficult for other tree species to compete. This includes large parts of higher elevation sites in Oregon, Washington, the Rocky Mountains and western Canada. Yellowstone National Park is dominated by this tree species.
However, warming temperatures, less winter precipitation, earlier loss of snowpack and more summer drought already appear to be affecting the range of lodgepole pine, at the same time increasing the infestations of bark beetles that attack this tree species.
The researchers concluded that some of these forces have been at work since at least 1980, and by around 2020 will have decreased the Pacific Northwest range of lodgepole pine by 8 percent. After that, continued climatic changes are expected to accelerate the species’ demise. By 2080, it is projected to be almost absent from Oregon, Washington and Idaho, some of the areas facing the most dramatic changes.
“For skeptics of climate change, it’s worth noting that the increase in vulnerability of lodgepole pine we’ve seen in recent decades is made from comparisons with real climatic data, and is backed up with satellite-observations showing major changes on the ground,” said Richard Waring, an OSU distinguished professor emeritus of forest science.
“This is already happening in some places,” Waring said. “Bark beetles in lodgepole pine used to be more selective, leaving the younger and healthier trees alone.
“Now their populations and pheromone levels are getting so high they can more easily reach epidemic levels and kill almost all adult trees,” he said. “Less frost, combined with less snow favors heavier levels of bark beetle infestation. We’re already seeing more insect attack, and we project that it will get worse.”
Some species are adapted to lower elevations, experts say, but lodgepole pine is predominately a sub-alpine tree species. Its new foliage can handle frost down to temperatures below freezing, it easily sheds snow that might break the branches of tree species more common at lower elevations, and it can survive in marginal soils.
But it makes these adaptations by growing more slowly, and as the subalpine environment becomes less harsh, lodgepole pine may increasingly be displaced by other species such as Douglas-fir, grand fir and ponderosa pine, which are also more drought-tolerant.
As lodgepole pine continues to decline, one of the few places on the map where it’s still projected to survive by 2080 is Yellowstone National Park – a harsh, high-elevation location – and a few other sub-alpine locations.
The species historically has played important ecological and cultural roles. It provided long, straight and lightweight poles often sought for tepees by Native American tribes, was later harvested commercially for poles and fence materials, and offers cover and habitat for big game animals.
Funding for this research was provided by NASA and the Natural Sciences Engineering and Research Council of Canada. A co-author of the study was Nicholas Coops with the University of British Columbia.
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Re Mike reference(9.12pm)
“The article br Kenneth F. Raffa….stresses the complexity of the biological processes…”
Pheww! I thought they said Briffa!
OK a lot of good info here and some good conjecture as well. A couple of fine points though from someone who was/is there:
In BC the beetle exploded in classic epizootic fashion from a park in the caribou forest district. Beetle control had long been a fact of life in the district but was not permitted in the park. Given the food supply in the park and a few warm winters it was predictable that the MPB population would explode. It did. The resources in the chilcotin were insufficient to make any dent in the population as it spread into crown land. Nothing concrete was done. The chilcotin plateau is mostly pine, much of it mature and in most years subjected to stress from various sources. The buildup of the population continued. When it emerged from the district into the surrounding ones, fall and burn control methods were useless. The opportunity for control was gone, the time for pointless weeping and pontification had begun.
The outbreak hit my home district with a vengeance. The beetle load was so high that wherever mature timber had been killed, immature trees (as small as 12cm in diameter) were subsequently attacked (killed). After about 3 years, the beetles ran out of food, and the damage moved on. This pattern has been repeating itself in the form of a wave radiating outwards from the chilcotin for years now.
I work in the fort st john area and last year the beetle finally settled into the more remote mountain valleys there. While the northern climate seems to have made a dent in the population, overall most of the mature pine up there is being killed.
SO much for the spread story. Here are some facts: three weeks of -30 degree temps in the middle of winter will NOT knock down an infestation of this size. Cold temperatures early in the fall/winter (-30 AT LEAST) or in early spring are far more effective. While mature pine are the main host, the beetle will kill young pine, doug fir and even spruce in areas where their numbers are extremely high. Pine beetle outbreaks are part of our history and prehistory here in BC for as long as fires have been. Pesticides are not effective. We could have predicted this outbreak since we have witnessed the exact same thing with the spruce bark beetle in the prince george district in the ’80s.
One more thing, as a point to consider: The weather in the fort st john area over the past few years has been colder than the weather in the pacific northwest has been in recorded history. Yet the beetle spread has not been stopped or even slowed down that much. I suspect it was colder in fort st john than it generally ever was in the southern interior of BC as well. Given this, how is it possible to conclude that the slight warming of the chilcotin , southern interior and pacific northwest has caused or even significantly contributed to the outbreak of pine beetle? It NEVER got cold enough down there to stop a beetle outbreak in the first place.
As an aside, we have recently had good success planting douglas fir up here. Previously we had too much frost damage. Global warming? Not so much. It is common here to find mature douglas fir growing on sites which would not (until recently at least ) allow Douglas Fir planting.
My apologies for the long post and for the typos, grammatical errors and erratic capitalization. It is late at night, i need to go to bed.
Steamboat Jon says:
February 28, 2011 at 10:39 pm
Wasn’t that basically a tornado in the mountains? I remember that event and also remember the anger on the lot of people regarding the waste of the wood.
Oh well. Nature is going to correct our poor management of the forests. Every time I drive up I-70 through Summit County, I wonder when the random lightning strike will set things off and reset the forest clocks.
We don’t have to wonder if things could be different.
There is a really good experiment going on right now in Montana.
See http://westinstenv.org/ffsci/2009/09/08/two-forests-under-the-big-sky-tribal-v-federal-management/
It is clear what works and what doesn’t. All that is needed is some common sense, a very scarce commodity.
I noticed how the garden centres were bringing many exotic plant species into the UK. Our gardens were looking very pretty with broad leaf banana plants, ferns grasses and others. We got away with it for a number of years.
It only takes one harsh cold spell to wipe them out. They only die once.
We have had two or three cold winters now and I have noticed many specimens disappearing from local gardens.
I wonder if springtime 2011 will come early as has been claimed. Not early enough for me.
Lodgepole pine is weed taking over our large areas of high country grasslands in New Zealand, it dosn’t need fire to spread, hot northwest winds spread the seed just fine.
http://www.biosecurity.govt.nz/pests/lodgepole-pine
Here’s a post with a different angle on this topic, from an earlier thread here:
A ranger in Yellowstone told me that the lodgepole pine was being attacked by this beetle because forest fires are kept under control or even eliminated in some areas due to alert reactions of rangers. It is the fires that keep the beetles under control. No fires more beetles less pines. Since the lodgepole pines survived warmer and colder periods than today it is not climate change that is the problem but lack of forest fires.
Call this a naive observation, but don’t forest fires;
1) help the reproductive cycle of Lodgepole Pine?
2) Kill bark beetles?
If the forest is “managed” in such a way as to minimise fires won’t this give the beetles an advantage?
I would also like to know what the climate record really shows during this period of increased bark beetle activity.
A few more winters like this one and this study will be long forgotten. They make the mistake of ASSUMING that we will continue to get global warming when the evidence shows it has stopped and we may be entering a cooling phase. What then with their study based on assumption. In the bin!
Yet another projection/prediction? Can anyone tell me what projection/prediction has actually come true?
‘this has happened for 30 years, so it must continue for another 70′
that’s the nub of the argument.
It is the most critical argument to have in climatology currently. Because I don’t buy that postulate. And also, as a person who studied biology quite a bit, I know that species’ populations can go wildly up and then wildly down without extinction coming. It’s entirely normal. It happens with salmon, it happens with rabbits, it happens with loads of species. So a 9% change in pine trees is piffling, in my opinion. Piffling.
Of course, the bark beetle should be monitored carefully.
But the world won’t end if 50% of the pines disappear, because the potential for regeneration will clearly be there. It’s only if you lose 99.9% that loss of species is likely……..
IMHO.
And here i was thinking that warmer climate led to wider three rings (thriving trees) as proposed in paleoclimatic studies, but all along warmer weather causes trees to die. This would require a total rework of the hockeystick graph.
In February 2010 I visited my old colleague Professor Emeritus, Jackson Davis, in Boulder, Colorado (I live in Somerset, England). Jackson is a marine biologist, but has always had an active involvement in environmental politics (he cofounded the environmental policy programme at the Monterey Institute for Policy Studies) – and my task was to brief him on what we might call the ‘sceptics’ position on climate change. As he helped to create the IPCC and wrote the working draft of the Kyoto Protocol, and went on the represent the Pacific island states coalition of interests at the climate convention, I had an uphill task! He was intensely sceptical of my analysis.
We took a day out to go walking in the Rockies. As we headed for a particular valley, where his grandfather had participated in work camps, he pointed out the large areas of red and dying pines and the beetle infestation – all down to global warming. I remarked that recently it had been admitted that 1934 was the warmest year in the contiguous states record. We eventually reached the valley and there was a plaque with a photograph of his grandfather’s tented encampment – it was black-and-white and you could see little difference relating to tree cover between then and now – and I noticed the date on the plaque….1934!
‘What was your grandfather doing here?’ I asked.
‘Cutting down dead pine trees’, he replied….with a laugh.
Maybe that was the turning point in my old friend’s mind. He has since revisited the ‘basic science’ and like me, is shocked at the poor quality.
I would be interested to see this paper – interested particularly to see how it deals with cyclic phenomena, if at all!
USDA/FS with other federal inter-agency and state and local partners have come along way from the days of “all fire is bad” (a hold over from just before WWII and continued well after WWII). Fire management and resource management go hand in hand and it is a part of and specialty of forestry and land management degrees for sometime now. The problem with the Routt blowdown of 1997 was the size/scope and fuel load that developed from all the downed trees. Yes mild winters (and follow-on drought years) made the situation worse (and led to bark beetle problem), one particularly bad fire season in several states was summer 2002 as the drought had lasted several years and we had several major fires going (I can’t recall the numbers but our forest had well over 800 fires that season, all of them natural in origin). That season the Routt NF got very lucky for the most part and conditions allowed a great deal of the fuel load to be reduced. Unfortunately the fires under this fuel load tend to damage the ecosystem and take generations to bounce back. So while not all fire is bad, all really hot fires are destructive and when you face large fuel loads hot and destructive is all you get. The bark beetle has protracted and spread the problem as it has moved from forest to forest and caused a die off of so many trees (adding fuel for future fires).
The 2010 Winter Olympic Games made use of the MPB wood.
The ice skating oval is an example see this:
http://www.bcbusinessonline.ca/bcb/business-sense/2010/02/03/pine-beetle-wood-spurs-innovation
I apologize if this has already been posted.
“After that, continued climatic changes are expected to accelerate the species’ demise.
I expect the cold winters over the next 13yrs will be the demise of their climatic forecast.
I’ll bet the “fact” that a certain level of “cold” kills the bark-beetles is bunk.
It was also a “fact” that cold prevented the westward movement of the introduced woolly adelgid, which is decimating eastern hemlocks in the central Appalachians. Recently I find out this is bunk — it is limited somewhat, not by cold, but by other environmental/ecological reasons as it moves westward, and it can survive temps well below what was previously assumed.
(known here previously and elsewhere in the Blogosphere as Mister Ed or mr_ed)
You’d want to see the article – and especially the data on all 12,600 sites – to really dig in and review the thing.
(1) For example, is this just part of the PR hyping it?
“[L]odgepole pine is expected to be able to survive in only 17 percent of its current range in the western parts of North America….
“After that [2020], continued climatic changes are expected to accelerate the species’ demise. By 2080, it is projected to be almost absent from Oregon, Washington and Idaho, some of the areas facing the most dramatic changes.”
(my emphasis)
“[T]he species’ demise” – are they talking about extinction? The rest of it sounds more like extirpation, and it’s either culpably misleading or annoyingly sloppy to suggest one when you mean the other. Even Dutch Elm Disease, which was apparently hugely, enormously devastating to the host species, didn’t manage to wipe it out in North America.
(2) Do they have enough data to tie this to climate?
“The researchers concluded that some of these forces have been at work since at least 1980….
“’For skeptics of climate change, it’s worth noting that the increase in vulnerability of lodgepole pine we’ve seen in recent decades….'”
Even a three-decade trend doesn’t seem long enough to correlate with climate. Not that I’d demand to see 1,000 years of proxy data for pheromone levels {grin}, but still. How far back does reliable quantitative data on pine-beetle damage go?
So, from me, no conclusions based just on this announcement.
As a professional forester, would like to add a few words on this issue. What is almost always missing in the discussions of bark beetles killing large areas of lodgepole pine and other conifers in the northern Rockies is the simple fact that many of these forests so affected are over-mature and overstocked (too dense). This situation came about because those who “manage” federal forests have almost completely abdicated their responsibilities. It is almost impossible now to even cut a green stick on the National Forests today, so even-aged forests (even-aged due to earlier, very large stand replacing wildfires started largely by lightning) become over stocked, over mature and thus, stressed and susceptible to beetle attack.
Had these forests been managed, the areas affected by beetles would be much smaller, and the epidemic would be much shorter in duration.
One last thing: Researchers behave as if the west has never had extended periods of drought in the past. We all know this is nonsense, but somehow now the current drought has to be caused by anthropogenic CO2.
[sarcasm off]
I predict that global anthropogenic climate change scientists will discover that said climate change will cause a gradual diminution of these beetles to the point that they will end up on the endangered species list, thus preventing any logging of these dead trees due to negative impacts associated with the destruction of natural pine beetle habitat. The grant for this research is already being written. Trust me, the folks in Ivory Towers see the writing on the wall and won’t let the coming cold decades go to waste.
They should check for increased levels of Aluminum, this could be what is causing them to die.
The researchers concluded that some of these forces have been at work since at least 1980, Yep, it was warming by then as others have pointed out, and beetles advanced. As it gets colder they will retreat. Aside from growing back if they are harvested, other species will infill if the area is left alone. It seems to me the different species would trade off areas as the minor temperature variations shift back and forth. We can see at the current tree lines, trees once existed higher, during warmer times in the past, as well as being exposed by retreating glaciers, further evidence of previously warmer times. Since this is Gore’s latest call to
armsalms, it’s hard to take it seriously.The beetles are by far the most important factor in the decline of lodgepole pines. In general, with mtn pine beetles, the timing of the cold is the most important factor. In winter, these critters hibernate, and their blood transforms to act like a kind of anti-freeze, and the cold may have little effect on them. Control of the population occurs when there are early Automn freezes, or late Spring freezes, ie. before/after they come out of hibernation.
The Government of Alberta has a good information sheet on mtn pine beetle and cold temperatures that can be found here:
http://www.mpb.alberta.ca/Files/pdf/MPBOverwinteringSheet-Jan2010.pdf
I thought the latest consensus was the precipitation will increase?
Data of 30 years (1980) is enough to evaluate trees that live 80+ years? Bad land management has been going on for that amount of time also, if not longer. AGW – a cause grasping for confirmation.