1996 - 2010 - Bark Beetles Take Out 4 Million Acres Of WY, CO Forests - 400K Just Last Year

[hatrack]

DENVER (Reuters) – Tree-killing bark beetles decimated 550,000 acres of forests in Colorado and Wyoming last year, bringing the total area ravaged by the insects in both states to 4 million acres since 1996, the U.S. Forest Service said on Sunday. "The significance is that the trajectory is moving north and east into more visible and populated areas," Janelle Smith, spokeswoman for the U.S. Forest Service, told Reuters.

Federal and state foresters just released their annual aerial survey of impacted lands across the two Rocky Mountain states. The main culprit is the mountain pine beetle responsible for infesting 400,000 acres in Colorado and southern Wyoming. The burrowing insects are moving into ponderosa pine forests from lodgepole pine stands along the Continental Divide, Smith said. The spruce beetle, more active in southern Colorado, attacked an additional 150,000 acres in 2010, the report noted.

The 4-million-acre combined tally accounts for less than a quarter of the estimated 17.5 million acres of trees attacked by bark beetles across the interior American West as a whole, including Idaho, Montana, Utah and New Mexico, since the 1990s, the Forest Service said.

The problem is even more extensive in Canada, where nearly 40 million acres of forest in the provinces of Alberta and British Columbia have been infested.

EDIT

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110123/us_nm/us_beetles_forests

[pipoman]

1. I have lost 4 trees to pine beetles

it really sucks. These trees were 80 years old.

[guardian]

3. A recommendation to protect your remaining trees

There is a preventative chemical spray that helps to keep the pine beetle from infesting a tree. I pay a service to spray all my pine trees in Springtime. They have a big power sprayer that can spray from the base of the tree up to about 65 feet high. Even though the spray only goes about half way up the tree, they tell me that the pine beetles usually crawl up from the base of the tree. I guess once the beetle gets a bad taste from the chemical they move to the next tree.

The cost isn't too bad. Certainly much cheaper than the cost of having to pay someone to cut down a single infected mature tree. I've been doing it every year for the last 12 years and haven't lost a tree. In contrast many of my neighbors who have not sprayed have lost trees.

Good luck with your remaining trees.

[OneTenthofOnePercent]

2. I hope Obama announces the WOA (war on arthropods) at his SOTU Address.