Mountain Pine Beetle

Mountain Pine Beetle

Dendroctonus Ponderosae

A relatively tiny insect which lives most of its life under the bark of pine trees is destroying the Northern Pine forests of British Columbia and has rapidly progressed Eastward into Alberta. The beetle, known as Dendroctonus Ponderosae, the Mountain Pine Beetle, infests indigenous Pine trees including lodgepole, ponderosa and western white pine. If it's migration is not stopped, all the continent-wide arboreal forest across Canada will become infected.

Since 1993, the 15 years since there has been a winter sufficiently cold enough to kill this voracious menace, 50% of British Columbia's Pine Forest has been destroyed. BC Forest Service estimates claim 80% destruction by 2013 with 25% forests in Alberta effected and reaching into Northern Saskatchewan. At this rate, it will take only 12 years to reach Ontario, 25 years to infest Quebec. 

Why this has happened is very much under the suspicion of Global Warming. On average, BC winter weather has been 2 degrees warmer, 2000 compared to 1990 with much shorter cold snaps when the temperature drops below –40C for a sustained period, the temperature required to reach and kill the beetle buried beneath the bark.

Summers over the last 10 years have been warmer as well with extended dry periods. This has increased the pine forest susceptibility to invasion of the mountain pine beetle. With so many dead and dying trees in an already dry forest, forest fires have increased. Over the last 50 years the BC forest service has done all it can to prevent fires and extinguish fires as soon as possible. Only recently have they come to the conclusion that perhaps this prevention was wrong. Fires are a natural occurrence that keeps a forest healthy. The weaker trees are burned in the fire along with any disease and parasites they may contain.

This year, a new revelation has come to light, all that dead carbon in the dying forest is rotting. Along with that decaying wood, methane gas release. The mountain pine beetle infestation is turning western forests into North America's number one source of greenhouse gas. The carbon dioxide-equivalent of approximately 100 megatonnes per year.

We have reached the point where there is not enough manpower or equipment to harvest all the infected timber and store it for some later use. Even if that was possible, how can all that timber be kept from rotting? With lumber sales at a 20 year low, what other use for that amount of timber is there?

Perhaps the spread of the pine beetle can be halted in Alberta by logging all the trees in a 5 kilometer wide strip, a beetle break straight up the entire northern center of the province?