It has been posited by paid alarmists like Joe Romm that global warming will increase pine beetle outbreaks, thus increasing the chances of wildfire. For example, in April 2013 Romm wailed:
“…the mountain pine beetle, has already killed 70,000 square miles of trees — area the size of Washington state. As winters become milder, weather becomes drier and higher elevations become warmer, bark beetles are able to thrive and extend their ranges northward. An increase in some species of bark beetle can actually increase the risk of forest fires in areas affected by the beetle — the study notes an outbreak of the mountain pine bark beetle, which attacks and kills live trees, created a “perfect storm” in 2006 in Washington, where affected lodgepole pines burned “with exceptionally high intensity.”
From the University of Colorado at Boulder:
Study: Western forests decimated by pine beetles not more likely to burn
Western U.S. forests killed by the mountain pine beetle epidemic are no more at risk to burn than healthy Western forests, according to new findings by the University of Colorado Boulder that fly in the face of both public perception and policy.
The CU-Boulder study authors looked at the three peak years of Western wildfires since 2002, using maps produced by federal land management agencies. The researchers superimposed maps of areas burned in the West in 2006, 2007 and 2012 on maps of areas identified as infested by mountain pine beetles.
The area of forests burned during those three years combined were responsible for 46 percent of the total area burned in the West from 2002 to 2013.
“The bottom line is that forests infested by the mountain pine beetle are not more likely to burn at a regional scale,” said CU-Boulder postdoctoral researcher Sarah Hart, lead study author. “We found that alterations in the forest infested by the mountain pine beetle are not as important in fires as overriding drivers like climate and topography.”
A paper on the subject is being published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study was funded by the Wilburforce Foundation and the National Science Foundation. The Wilburforce Foundation is a private, philanthropic group that funds conservation science in the Western U.S. and western Canada.
Co-authors on the new study include CU-Boulder Research Scientist Tania Schoennagel of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, CU-Boulder geography Professor Thomas Veblen and CU-Boulder doctoral student Teresa Chapman.
The impetus for the study was in part the severe and extensive native bark beetle outbreaks in response to warming temperatures and drought over the past 15 years that have caused dramatic tree mortality from Alaska to the American Southwest, said Hart. Mountain pine beetles killed more than 24,700 square miles of forest across the Western U.S. in that time period, an area nearly as large as Lake Superior.
“The question was still out there about whether bark beetle outbreaks really have affected subsequent fires,” Hart said. “We wanted to take a broad-scale, top-down approach and look at all of the fires across the Western U.S. and see the emergent effects of bark beetle kill on fires.”
Previous studies examining the effect of bark beetles on wildfire activity have been much smaller in scale, assessing the impact of the insects on one or only a few fires, said Hart. This is the first study to look at trends from multiple years across the entire Western U.S. While several of the small studies indicated bark beetle activity was not a significant factor, some computer modeling studies conclude the opposite.
The CU-Boulder team used ground, airplane and satellite data from the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Geological Survey to produce maps of both beetle infestation and the extent of wildfire burns across the West.
The two factors that appear to play the most important roles in larger Western forest fires include climate change — temperatures in the West have risen by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970 as a result of increasing greenhouse gases — and a prolonged Western drought, which has been ongoing since 2002.
“What we are seeing in this study is that at broad scales, fire does not necessarily follow mountain pine beetles,” said Schoennagel. “It’s well known, however, that fire does follow drought.”
The 2014 Farm Bill allocated $200 million to reduce the risk of insect outbreak, disease and subsequent wildfire across roughly 70,000 square miles of National Forest land in the West, said Hart. “We believe the government needs to be smart about how these funds are spent based on what the science is telling us,” she said. “If the money is spent on increasing the safety of firefighters, for example, or protecting homes at risk of burning from forest fires, we think that makes sense.”
Firefighting in forests that have been killed by mountain pine beetles will continue to be a big challenge, said Schoennagel. But thinning such forests in an attempt to mitigate the chance of burning is probably not an effective strategy.
“I think what is really powerful about our study is its broad scale,” said Hart. “It is pretty conclusive that we are not seeing an increase in areas burned even as we see an increase in the mountain pine beetle outbreaks,” she said.
“These results refute the assumption that increased bark beetle activity has increased area burned,” wrote the researchers in PNAS. “Therefore, policy discussions should focus on societal adaptation to the effect of the underlying drivers: warmer temperatures and increased drought.”
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The primary cause for the pine beetle outbreak was the park services earlier policy of fighting all fires.
As a result fires no longer periodically thinned the forests. The resulting over crowding stressed the trees and made all of them vulnerable to the pine beetle.
I would suspect that the fact that CO2 makes trees stronger and healthier would result in less pine beetle infestations in future years.
Great minds think alike … LOL!
I thought the reason for the pine beetle fiasco was that our “management” (e.g. wildfire “zero tolerance”) for 100 years has given the grazers (like beetles) a windfall. Population boom has ensued. And that’s all she wrote.
You are correct.
This is the first study to look at trends from multiple years across the entire Western U.S. While several of the small studies indicated bark beetle activity was not a significant factor, some computer modeling studies conclude the opposite.
Try , some computers programmed by dogmatic modelers without study conclude the opposite
study authors looked at the three peak years of Western wildfires since 2002, using maps produced by federal land management agencies. The researchers superimposed maps of areas burned in the West in 2006, 2007 and 2012 on maps of areas identified as infested by mountain pine beetles.
&
temperatures in the West have risen by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970 as a result of increasing greenhouse gases — and a prolonged Western drought, which has been ongoing since 2002.
Looking at fires from 2002 & temperatures 1970?? What was the temperature difference 2002 to 2012.
“We believe the government needs to be smart about how these funds are spent based on what the science is telling us,” she said. “If the money is spent on increasing the safety of firefighters, for example, or protecting homes at risk of burning from forest fires, we think that makes sense.”
Firefighting in forests that have been killed by mountain pine beetles will continue to be a big challenge, said Schoennagel. But thinning such forests in an attempt to mitigate the chance of burning is probably not an effective strategy.
Does any one else remember when the entire Forestry Department actually made a profit from managing this county’s forest resources? Let’s definitely not allow any one to cut down and use a tree, better to burn in place.
I’ve surveyed and worked on a control unit dealing specifically with mountain pine beetle in Canada. Absolutely, beetle killed trees candle hot and fast. The fact that pine beetles are high in number says that the pone trees themselves are struggling, otherwise their natural defenses would mitigate the beetle attack somewhat. Beetle attack is a natural stage in the forest cycle, as are forest fires. Ironically, let the forest fires burn and we reduce the number of trees prone to a ballooning beetle population. What is not said often enough is that pine cones release their seeds in high heat, meaning new pine forests are made possible only after a fire. New pine forests are a hotbed for native animal and insect species, in some cases a sparse species will return and flourish in a new forest. Fire does not equal bad. Fire is a natural forest mechanism.
I was an Acquisitions Forester for Boise Cascade Corporation in eastern Oregon in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s and we were having massive infestations of the mountain pine beetle then, so it is nothing new. The primary problem regarding the mountain pine beetle has little to do with a tiny amount of warming and almost everything to do with the fact that our federal forest lands are greatly overstock in many areas. Since the late 1970s, environment groups, through court actions, essentially halted timber harvests on federal lands in the United States. Since that time, there have been virtually no timber harvests on federal lands. In the past 34 years, our forest inventory has continued to grow and we currently have 40% more standing timber than we did in 1950. However, without harvesting and applying silvicultural treatments such as thinning, and as a result of our prior fire suppression policies, the health of our forests has declined precipitously due to over-crowding and stagnation. This has led to massive insect infestations such as the mountain pine beetle, which created conditions ideal for the massive forest fires that we are seeing each summer. The health of our forest could be dramatically improved by thinning and selective partial cutting.
Ironically, while we have greatly reduced our timber harvests in the United States, we have not reduced our consumption of wood products. Last year, we imported $14,710,000,000 worth of lumber, up from $12,420,000,000 in 2012; a high percentage from Canada, but some from as far away as New Zealand and Finland. We preach a mantra regarding farm products of buying locally whenever possible. Should we not apply the same thought process to forest products as well?
Additionally, claiming that having millions of acres of dead, standing timber does not increase forest fire danger simply defies all logic and practical experience.
drhealy: do you know if there are any studies showing fire rates of corporate managed forests versus Federally managed forests?
No I don’t. I left forestry in 1977 because it was a dying profession and haven’t followed that issue. However, the feds own about 75% of the forested land in the western U. S. so they are the dominant player. Weyerhaeuser owns a very large amount of acreage but mostly in the very western parts of Washington and Oregon that aren’t so prone to forest fires. Boise Cascade and others sold off there timberlands to limited partnership investment groups like Plum Creek that generally start logging fairly quickly and heavily to maximize their return and once logged, the fire potential drops to close to zero.
Sorry, this probably doesn’t help much.
drhealy: It does help. Thanks. My thought was that it might be an interesting comparison, but your response sounds like it would be more of an apples/oranges comparison therefore not worth pursuing as a serious question. Thus moving on to my next question in life, whatever that be. WUWT helps fulfill that addiction. : )
If you check the daily incident reports, when new fires are posted they always list upon what land ownership each fire was started. Very, very rarely do new fires get started on private, managed forests. Almost always, these large fires get their starts on public land, and usually federal.
Even the worst fire does not DESTROY the land. Just allows for renewal. Most fire areas that I have see in the last 60 years just regrows with new vegetation. The old timers of the 1950s told me that the forests of the 1890swere “Park like” open with few thickets of brush and small trees. The Indians and later the settlers burned out the thickets in the late fall. Then the Government got involved and stopped all fires starting in the 1930s and by the late 1950s the massive wild fires began in the western states. As funding for fire prevention increased so did the size of the fires. Pine trees will attempt to grow far too thick for the land to support so as the stress increases they are killed by beetle infestation. GODs way to thin the local numbers of pines. The beetles are always there testing for weakened pines. pg
What a novel Idea to look at historical data without the beetle and compare with the period with the beetle.
I thought the scientific method was make an isolated observation, then jump to wild conclusions and hope you get a mention in a NY Times article.
Science publicists are advising their scientist clients that since skeptics have officially been banned from the media for the anti-scientific heresy of rigorous, thoughtful analysis and debate, better to just stick to wild conclusions and conjecture to ensure your brand image growing.
Clearly the end game is to keep tacking “seemingly” destructive natural forces onto the warming hysteria. Like an above commenter said, pine beetle attack is nothing new, what is new is the emense effort we put into culling fires. And now the fires are somehow proof of AGW. The “consensus” deerly loves correlation without causal relation. Its annoying that I have to listen to news outlets attributing every change the world experiences to atmospheric carbon…oh here’s a good one. I was bandying with Christopher Keating months back, and his justification for using the diacusting term “denier” on his political opponents was to say that humans are dying every day relative to those innocents who dies each day at the hand of the Nazi regime. I accepted his appology
If you take the railway up Pikes Peak you will pass an area where the guide will tell you you are seeing the still visible scars of a pine beetle infestation in the 1980s , if I remember correctly . I’ve only seen the beetle kill area along the I-70 corridor where it has distinct west and east boundaries . It does not extend south down here where winters are distinctly warmer — tho here at 2500m that means a 20c diurnal variation year round and an average -16c nighttime minimum in Dec-Jan . We do have endemic pine beetles killing the occasional tree , but no epidemic apparently since the one pointed out on the Pikes Peak tour . By watermelon logic , we should have it worse than up north .
But simply the range cited “from Alaska to the American Southwest” makes the idea that even a 1.1c change in Colorado temperature since the 1970s . With the massive increase in population almost everywhere in the state since then , I’m not sure where you would find stations not tainted by UHI effects .
With respect to forest fires , they suck . They are total bad news and the let it burn philosophy is next to criminal . There is a legend that some varieties of pines “like” fires because they pop their seeds . I think this feel good tale may have been foisted by a Scientific American article on the ecology of fire I remember from when I got the rag back in the ’60s . I don’t know where those magical species are , but they are apparently not competitive around here despite what would be an overwhelming advantage .
Here , it takes decades , plural , for the forests to recover . And the scars are massive and ugly . The waste is enormous .
Driving up CO 67 and 126 to take 285 down into Denver , half or more of the trip is thru now decade old burn scars . Here’s a view from Google Earth on which I’ve circled the Hayman fire in 2002 and outlined a earlier fire near Buffalo Creek which I just googled was in 1996 .
http://cosy.com/Science/CO_Fires.jpg
These areas continue to be bereft of trees or even seedlings . Here is a StreetView of about where the Hayman burn meets CO 67 about 15km north of us .
http://cosy.com/Science/HaymanFireMeetsCO67.jpg
The area south of Buffalo Creek is just as naked .
I’ve started to notice that what regrowth is occurring is around isolated stands , some near ridge tops , which for one reason or another escaped total cremation . First the old trees slowly recover , then eventually the seeds they produce start enlarging the islands .
But we’re talking generational time spans here with NOTHING done by the US forest service to restore these lands . This neglect both before and after these disasters is one of the driving forces behind the http://americanlandscouncil.org/ movement for the western states to take back control of their lands from arrogant anti-reality WDC easterners .
What you are omitting is that many of the barren areas that take decades to recover are angled and south facing. The summer sun does not allow seedling to take hold, I. Those areas the seedlings need help to get going. I’ve planted nearly a million pine trees myself, I’m an expert. And no fires are not wasteful. I’ve visited countless burn sites over the last 20 years and depending on the site, moisture content of the soil and shading present, the forests recover quickly and in good heath. There is nothing criminal about using a burn to the forests advantage. In fact burns are often used to cull massive fires. Burns are a tool of agriculture, and where trees are concerned, reclamation projects are often used to bring burnt wood to the marketplace. Yes some areas are difficult to reforest, but I’ve personally worked on one such site just outside of Kelowna BC, its highly specialized planting that gets the job done, and it does get the job done. Most pine species require heat to open their cones.
Actually , while about half those burn zones are south facing it makes little difference as can be seen from the uniformity of the scars in the Google Earth view . And much of the burn area visible from 126 south of Buffalo Creek is relatively flat . Here’s a StreetView .
http://cosy.com/Science/BurnAreaSoOfBuffaloCreek.jpg
And that’s apparently since 1996 .
I don’t see how you can contend that those many thousand hectare scars are not wasteful . They are a blight on tourism if nothing else .
I’ll totally agree that replanting , particularly the frequently steep slopes is clearly difficult to get seedlings to take hold . Some of the steep south facing slopes never have thick cover . However I simply find it hard to believe that no 21st century solution to accelerating regrowth is not possible . It seems to me it would be feasible to spread tens of millions of seeds from the air . Even if only one in a thousand or fewer actually take root you would get some nuclei for regrowth where there continues to be none . I have often wondered if “ownership” rights to these wastelands were sold to commercial forestry corporations what they would do . I cannot believe that they would allow such potentially productive assets to remain fallow for decades .
I’m not talking about controlled burns and other ground debris clearing methods . They do that now quite aggressively in Pike Forest just north of us between here and to Hayman burn picture I posted . There are a few areas where I think they overcooked it and I’ll be interested to see if some of the base charred trees will recover , but at least they are being experimental and proactive .
Hot dry years like 2012 are downright scary . Here’s a picture from the local Safeway the first day of the Waldo Canyon fire : http://cosy.com/y12/BurgerKingN0477crop1.jpg .
Given that experience , what I found unconscionable was the lack of preparedness the next year when , despite having C130s which can be ( and should have been proactively ) fitted with fire retardant dumping tanks sitting at Peterson AFB , it took 18 hours for the first aerial response to a fire which was originally reported when only 12 acres , and which consequentially destroyed more homes in the Black Forest than had been destroyed on the slopes of Colorado Springs by the Waldo Canyon fire .
Again , the mismanagement of local lands by the Federal government is a rapidly increasing irritation to the western states and is becoming a major political issue out here .
As an example , one of our Teller County commissioners told me that they had arranged with the coal fired power plant at the base of Ute Pass to mix all the forest debris they were cleaning out into their fuel mix . You would think this use of “biomass” would be welcomed , but the Feds regulated and red-taped into impracticality .
Bob Armstrong:
As an “aerial response” pilot for most of 20 years, (air tankers, heavy and light) the stories I could tell!!! Bureaucratic incompetence, CYA, empire building, conflicting “standard procedures” all fertilized with a healthy dose of the peter principle. Add to that various Green lobbies, timber lobbies and tourist industry lobbies and one begins to wonder how we have any forest left at all.
To your point, it’s not at all uncommon for a “National Resource” such as an air tanker to sit for days on the ground during a death watch on a fire that is 100% contained and being mopped up, “Just in Case.” Meanwhile, new starts that could be stopped in their tracks by a single drop blow up and run thousands of acres.
On one occasion in the 90’s a friend was orbiting overhead a single tree burning from a lighting strike with 2400 gallons of retardant on board. He was denied permission to drop and reassigned elsewhere. That single tree grew to over 100,000 acres. I could overflow this thread with similar accounts.
On the lighter side, there’s the legend of “Geyser Bill” (a true story) when an air tanker pilot (not me!) dropped 2000 gallons on a steam plume from a geyser trickling up through the trees. He didn’t put it out…
I know . There must have been lots of crew sitting around Peterson frustrated as hell to not to be able to do anything about this conflagration metastasizing just 15 minutes flying time away . I actually think some private DC-10 or whatever was the first responder and nothing came from Peterson for 24 hours .
In the spring of 2012 , the Waldo Canyon year , which was extremely hot a dry , Teller county was “on pins and needles” and everybody had their eyes out for any possible starting fires . Something like 22 were actually spotted and stopped . We apparently had some insane arsonist .
The Hayman fire in 2002 was started by some Forest Service worker who apparently was pissed off at her boyfriend and started a fire to burn his letters . It roared from Lake George most of the way to Deckers in one day . The general feeling around here is that arson should be considered worse than attempted murder and those guilty get life .
We were in the cautionary evacuation zone for Waldo , but being somewhat west of it felt we had a good buffer . I was outside the evening the heat broke and I felt the first cool wind come from the west . But my immediate thought was that this was bad news for the Springs — as it turned out to be blowing the fire into the neighborhoods right up against the mountains .
The next week we had drenching rains . I took pictures of the water hole we have out back the week of the fire and about a week later . They are towards the bottom of http://cosy.com/y12/CoSyMidSummerMela20120804.html .
Climate Change ‘ll get you .
One important thing to note is that AFTER the pine beetles have decimated large areas of forests, there is a lot less pine needles in the forest canopy to fuel any wildfires. I regularly hike in areas that had been beetle infested, and I can say that a fire would have a much harder time burning through these areas where the are hardly any remaining big live trees. On the other hand, as many commenters have already pointed out occurs after wildfires, there is an abundance of new life springing up. These little saplings are much less likely to burn than old growth, sickly trees.
“…after wildfires, there is an abundance of new life springing up. ”
My images posted above show that is false .
Bob, it’s true some areas are a challenge. The Kelowna fire sounds like a similar case to yours. In that case we hammered in Cedar shakes to shade the seedlings. Time consuming and very costly. that area will be decades in its recovery. Although a few wet years cous change everything. Also, the vast majority of burns recover on their own without any help from us.
Your posts aside, as a fire climax ecosystem, all the forest burnt in the kelowna fire originated from past fire events. The pine beetle has always been an agent of forest renewal. Lodgepole pine typically burns or is killed by beetles. Preventing the former has definately led to more problems with the latter.
I suspect your area in BC is both substantially wetter and lower altitude than here in the CO Front Range .
I also think there is great difference between beetle kill which leaves at least some young trees and ground cover and the literally scorched earth of these fires which clearly leave virtually no seed unburned . Old bare ATV tracks around some of our pines have mini park-lands of few baby pines emerging .
I moved out here from Manhattan in 2005 and kept looking for the first appearance of saplings . But even scrub growth was slow to reestablish itself , and after half a decade I started realizing that whatever our species are they are not the phoenix pines of urban legend .
Any hand replanting is extremely expensive , But I cannot believe some effective aerial method could not be developed . It’s easy to collect millions of pine cones and tear them into tens of millions of seeds and scattering them from the air after rain or snow-melt would at least nucleate some new growth . And now of course fertilizers , etc are commonly coated on seeds or made into little starter bundles with them .
Clearly further research is called for .
“The pine beetle has always been an agent of forest renewal.”
In a healthy forest ecosystem, that may be true. But in one with elevated temperatures and reduced rainfall, a far higher percentage of trees become weakened and die off, in which case the word decimation is more appropriate than renewal.
Back in the 1960s we were taught that there was Fire Climax vegetation which allowed forest to spread into Post Glacial plains. The softwood trees were all old about the same time and burned naturally thus opening their previously dense canopy so that their prolific seedlings could grow on the fertile ashes of the old trees. I don’t know how the theory holds now, though.
No comment other than
http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/forests/insects-diseases/13397
http://sdda.sd.gov/conservation-forestry/forest-health/mountain-pine-beetle/identification-biology/
“Mountain pine beetle is native to the Black Hills and has probably inhabited the Hills as long as there has been a pine forest. This insect, as with many other insects, goes through cycles where they become very abundant and then relatively rare. When the beetle population is very low only stressed or weakened trees, such as those struck by lightning, are colonized. However, about every ten years or so the beetle population increases and the beetles begin colonizing healthy as well as stressed trees. These outbreaks last for about five to 13 years after which the beetle population once again declines.
The first recorded outbreak in the Black Hills occurred in the late 1890s. An estimated 10 million trees were killed during this outbreak. Approximately five outbreaks have occurred since that time though none has reached the same magnitude”
If warming had anything to do with pine beetle outbreak, then the 1890s would have been warmer than now.
Almost precisely the same situation with the Eastern Spruce Budworm. Years to decades of minor infestation followed by a few years of extreme damage. As I recall, records of that go all the way back to the 18th century. Again with no obvious correlation to climate, at least the last I heard.
The pine beetles I’ve talked to say it bites that the bark tastes bad, but they’re warming to it. Good night. You’ve been a great crowd.
In the total picture, as the climate, not necessarily warms as much as people think it will, a few degrees will move topography further North and South of the Equator. Thus, forest will move north.
Too, there was over planting in these forests like the Black Hills during the Civilian job corps era of the Great Depression. Now, with urban growth, the water she’d is not large enough to support the number of trees planted 70 to 80 years ago.
The Pine Beetle is doing its job. It’s thinning the herd. Then the forest fires come. Then grasslands are left in there place until the next mini ice age or Ice Age.
Sincerely
Paul Pierett
The mountain pine beetle was my first clue that AGW might be less than it was trumped up to be. When it was first postulated that the beetle outbreak was due to warmer temperatures I started paying attention. For one thing, warmer winters do not in themselves result in higher beetle populations. Beetle populations are controlled by unseasonably cold weather in the early winter or late spring, or by exceptionally cold weather in the winter for a prolonged period. For another, as someone who works in the district where the pine beetle outbreak originated I can tell you that the outbreak was due to a beetle population buildup in the mature forests of the chilcotin, Once the population built up in the provincial park there was no stopping it, even if the resources had existed in the chilcotin district. While a freak cold spell might have had an effect, a 1 degree warming trend clearly would not.
It was with some disappointment that i found my own professional organization promoting the AGW-beetle link, since it’s members, like myself clearly understood that it was untrue. And so a skeptical cynic was born.
Very interesting – I’ll pass that on to some people in BC.
There are many factors in forest fires, including the effect of decades of suppression, the BC government was muttering about making firebreaks to protect communities.
(Most forest land in BC is owned by the government, in contrast to WA state. (The proportion of private ownership on Vancouver Island is higher due to land given to the CPR on building the “E&N” railway from Victoria to Courtenay.))
Even eco-nuts like the People’s State of Highlands (NW of Victoria BC) woke up to the realization that charging for permits to clear brush around houses could result in less clearing of “interface” areas that increase risk to houses.
How about a little common sense? 1) Dead trees burn better than live ones. 2) Pine beetles kill trees.
What fraction of trees need to be dead before there is a significantly increase risk of forest fire?
The main cause of beetle infestation is and continues to be suppression of forest fires.
That statement is utterly FALSE and WRONG. That is not how it works.
Fires CAUSE beetle outbreaks, not the reverse.
“Fire suppression” does not cause fires or beetles. That’s just another dysanthropic propaganda rant. You bozos who want forest fires to rage uncontained across millions of acres of America’s priceless heritage forests, farms, towns and cities are similar if not identical to Taliban terrorists.
I know you all are enamoured with Disneyesque pseudo-science, but gee whiz! Catch a clue! Human beings are NOT wrecking the planet or its myriad ecosystems. The green nazis want you to believe that, but its not true.
PS to Frank: live trees burn better than snags with no needles. Maybe not in your fireplace, but definitely outdoors on a dry day in the real world.
Semi-Ditto .
I think the comments on the semi-periodic bursts in beetle populations is most reasonable . Quasi-periodic insect outbursts are well known . I grew up in North Shore Suburban Chicago and experienced the cycles of the cicada early on .
Fires don’t cause beetle outbreaks . As I have pointed out with StreetViews , after fires there is nothing left . And around here , it remains that way for decades . Wherever those Disney phoenix pines are , they are not around here .
The term tinder dry is all too accurate . In a hot dry year even a healthy pine forest is dangerously explosive . Once their needles have fallen , I’m sure a beetle killed area would be less so . I think that accounts for the lack of correlation .
Just a note on aspen : Where they decide to grow remains a mystery to me . We have some in our dale down by our well . That makes sense . It’s the wettest and most protected area . What’s remarkable is that any survive the deer debarking them as saplings to reach adulthood . The attrition is high .
They do come back in along the creeks and washes in the fire scars . But they don’t spread uphill .
What I can’t see any pattern to is the stands of aspen scattered along the flanks of Pikes Peak or along the road to Cripple Creek . It’s not obvious that there’s a difference in available water or sun . The stands just seem random .
Clearly there is need for further research .
ATheoK
March 24, 2015 at 8:01 am
Sorry for the flubbed bockquote tags; ATheok’s comment ends with the first paragraph immediately above.
ATheoK
March 24, 2015 at 8:01 am
(my bold)
Thanks to ATheoK’s comment in passing, WUWT wasn’t completely skunked on this point.
Even woodpeckers…imagine that: birds eat insect pests. Who knew?
Brittanica 2000 (EB)
This fact sheet from CSU ( D.A. Leatherman, I. Aguayo, and T.M. Mehall) recommends spraying infected trees, while noting that
“Chemical control options for MPB larvae have been greatly limited in recent years. At present, there are no labeled pesticides for use on MPB.” but goes on to describe several chemicals for application on infected trees:
“Certain formulations of carbaryl (Sevin and others) permethrin (Astro, Dragnet and others), and bifenthrin (Onyx) are registered for use to prevent attacks on individual trees. These sprays are applied to living green trees in early summer to kill or deter attacking beetles. This preventive spray is generally quite effective through one MPB flight (one year).”
“Natural controls of mountain pine beetle include woodpeckers and insects such as clerid beetles that feed on adults and larvae under the bark. However, during outbreaks these natural controls often fail to prevent additional attacks.”
http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/insect/05528.html
No chance, I suppose, that the spraying is also depressing populations of potential predators of the MPB.
SPB not MPB, but interesting tidbits about the woodpeckers:
http://www.barkbeetles.org/spb/Woodpeckers/WPImpact.html
That’s all for now.
.