{"id":456062,"date":"2010-03-21T17:41:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-21T21:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9864176.post-3130591781303026774"},"modified":"2010-03-21T17:44:00","modified_gmt":"2010-03-21T21:44:00","slug":"what%e2%80%99s-killing-the-great-forests-of-the-american-west","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/456062","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s Killing the Great Forests of the American West ?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yale E360 has an article on the impact of global warming on the world’s forests – What\u2019s Killing the Great Forests of the American West?<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For many years, Diana Six, an entomologist at the University of Montana, planned her field season for the same two to three weeks in July. That\u2019s when her quarry \u2014 tiny, black, mountain pine beetles \u2014 hatched from the tree they had just killed and swarmed to a new one to start their life cycle again.<\/p>\n

Now, says Six, the field rules have changed. Instead of just two weeks, the beetles fly continually from May until October, attacking trees, burrowing in, and laying their eggs for half the year. And that\u2019s not all. The beetles rarely attacked immature trees; now they do so all the time. What\u2019s more, colder temperatures once kept the beetles away from high altitudes, yet now they swarm and kill trees on mountaintops. And in some high places where the beetles had a two-year life cycle because of cold temperatures, it\u2019s decreased to one year.<\/p>\n

Such shifts make it an exciting \u2014 and unsettling \u2014 time to be an entomologist. The growing swath of dead lodgepole and ponderosa pine forest is a grim omen, leaving Six \u2014 and many other scientists and residents in the West \u2014 concerned that as the climate continues to warm, these destructive changes will intensify.<\/p>\n

\u201cA couple of degrees warmer could create multiple generations a year,\u201d she said, as she chopped off a piece of bark on a dead lodgepole pine to show the galleries of burrowing larvae. \u201cIf that happens, I expect it would be a disaster for all of our pine populations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Across western North America, from Mexico to Alaska, forest die-off is occurring on an extraordinary scale, unprecedented in at least the last century-and-a-half \u2014 and perhaps much longer. All told, the Rocky Mountains in Canada and the United States have seen nearly 70,000 square miles of forest \u2014 an area the size of Washington state \u2014 die since 2000. For the most part, this massive die-off is being caused by outbreaks of tree-killing insects, from the ips beetle in the Southwest that has killed pinyon pine, to the spruce beetle, fir beetle, and the major pest \u2014 the mountain pine beetle \u2014 that has hammered forests in the north.<\/p>\n

These large-scale forest deaths from beetle infestations are likely a symptom of a bigger problem, according to scientists: warming temperatures and increased stress, due to a changing climate. Although western North America has been hardest hit by insect infestations, sizeable areas of forest in Australia, Russia, France, and other countries have experienced die-offs, most of which appears to have been caused by drought, high temperatures, or both.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n