An article at NPR.org quotes a National Park Service employee who is running the pine beetle mitigation program at Mount Rushmore National Memorial:
“It’s a matter of controlling the exponential growth of this pine beetle,” says Bruce Weisman, the National Park ranger leading the fight against the insects. “We’ve seen this explosion and it’s coming over the ridgeline directly at us right now.”
Crews are cutting down trees below the four faces and feeding them into huge wood chippers. Weisman says to save this forest from destruction, the smaller overgrown pine trees on 500 acres of the park must come down. He says this is about more than beetles. Bug-killed trees are prone to burn, and one lightning strike could start a major wildfire.
“Our fuel loads would be so tremendous that [a] catastrophic firestorm would sweep right over the top of the memorial and it would be a catastrophic loss of all facilities,” he says.
There may be some legitimate reasons for thinning the trees in the Memorial, such as to help the remaining trees stay healthy so they can repel a beetle attack or to preserve a landscape that is pleasing to the human eye, but to prevent a “catastrophic” fire is not one of them. Science, research, and wildland fire behavior knowledge have shown that a forest that has been killed by beetles is not necessarily going to burn with more extreme fire behavior than a green forest. As soon as a pine tree dies, the very flammable volatile oils which cause a green tree to burn so well begin to break down. Less volatile oils means a fire will not burn as intensely. And, soon after the tree dies, the dead needles fall off and begin to decompose on the ground, providing fewer aerial fuels, making a crown fire less likely.
Mount Rushmore proposed spending $5.7 million to mitigate the beetles in the 1,200-acre Memorial; that was reduced to $2.7 million — about $2,196 an acre.
Another way to prevent the “catastrophic loss of all facilities” in a wildfire would be to implement Firewise principles, so that when the inevitable fire burns through the property the structures are more likely to survive. It is not IF, but WHEN.
Here’s an article on this issue from NASA:
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/beetles-fire.html
Wildfire Today has become one of my favorite resources for science and forest health and heard the NPR story referred to in Bill’s post.
Here is a related story about restoration efforts in the Black Hills. The journalist that wrote it is the most respected in South Dakota.
I have lived in the Black Hills for thirty years but now live in Basin, MT, write as interested party and am researching the connections of predators to forest health.
Best wishes.
I am in the neighborhood. They are chipping and distributing excess biomass back into the woods. Some helicopters are being used to transport logs to the landing.
Thank you for the information.
So what is the park service doing with all the tons of wood chips?
It is unusual for the NPS in taking such extensive, major impact on the land and expensive action. In the past they would have just left it to burn or done a series of prescribed fires and taken actions under firewise to protect the structures. The monument is a man made one and I do not consider the rock faces in danger of burning up. It seems the least impact method is to cut and leave the stuff to rot away or support ground fires.
Bill, are they bringing the wood to the chippers or the chippers to the wood?
Good points, B.Morgan. If I’m in the neighborhood, I’ll stop by and check it out.
I guess I’m repetitive if I ask how much controlled burning that amount would buy!
Remove the predators, expect pine beetle outbreaks!
Dr. John Laundre’ from the blog of the Cougar Rewilding Foundation:
“Though one can reduce the number of less than 3 month old kittens orphaned by changing the season dates and trying to find those that are, there still will be small spotted kittens left out in the woods to starve to death. The public needs to know this. Also, by the calculations presented, 40 % of the females killed will have kittens between 3 months and 1 year old. Though there is a 71% survival rate (again one value from one study), this still means that out of the 20 females with these age kittens, 17 died of starvation and over 40 survived uneducated!
These become the trouble makers, the ones who will go to human inhabited areas and eat pets or domestic stock, or attack people. Are we not exacerbating the dilemma of problem cougars (which some then use as an excuse to kill more)? I think that there can be an acceptable level of orphaning but the current management plan does not achieve it. Lastly, I would like to observe that many of the management strategies proposed here, if applied to ungulates, would be considered biologically unacceptable.
For example, would the Department (SDGFP) propose that out of a bighorn sheep population of 160 adult (huntable animals), hunters could kill 40 of them, including females?? Would the Department allow the killing of does with spotted fawns? For that matter, would current game laws permit hunters to shoot deer, take their head and hide and leave the meat in the forest? I think these issues need to be addressed and the public be made aware of them if the all the public is to make sound decisions on the management of mountain lions.”
150 years ago aspen was the predominant tree species on the Black Hills and the Rocky Mountain Complex. Populus tremuloides, the most widely distributed deciduous tree species on Earth, is critical to the survival of the Black Hills’ unique ecotones. Beaver communities rely on aspen to slow runoff and store water supplies. Paha Sapa (“hills that are black” may have been a reference to burnt timber instead of the accepted, “seen from a distance”) hasn’t been a natural forest since 1859 when a nearly Hills-wide fire (possibly set by humans hoping to clear pine), opened grazing for distinct historic ungulates. Aspen shoots are favorite browse for elk and bison. Brown and Sieg have noted at least 77 instances of human-induced wildfire on the pre-settlement Hills.
From the Missoulian: “Researcher Christina Eisenberg’s work shows that before wolves were killed out, about one in every six aspen trees grew to reach the canopy. When wolves were absent, perhaps one in 300 made it. Aspen ecosystems are considered some of the finest and richest songbird habitat on the continent, second only to river-bottom riparian zones. Remove the wolf, and you remove the songbirds. Remove the songbirds, and the bugs move in. Everything changes, top to bottom, right down to the dirt.”
Mycologists report disruption in the fungal communities associated with aspen: the oyster mushroom, pleurotus ostreatus, is in steep decline. The saprophytic mushrooms often associated with human consumption are the most important bioremediators of toxins presenting on the Forest. Morels fruit after fires in mixed pine/aspen habitat to entice animals to deposit organic material; bison and elk will crawl on their knees and loll their long tongues for morels growing under dead-fallen pine trees. The suppression of fire threatens that relationship, too.
The Forest Service manages about 1.25 million acres in the Hills, most of the other 5.5 million acres of the Black Hills hydrologic region are privately held lands whose owners largely blame forest failures on Federal or State mismanagement. Ponderosa pine draws water from deep sources in ore-bearing formations and transpires both water vapor and heavy metal oxides downwind, aspen stores more surface water. Pine needles absorb heat and shed snowmelt, aspen leaves reflect sunlight in summer and hold snowpacks.
There are signs of accidental success: the Grizzly Gulch Fire outside of Deadwood has yielded a very encouraging, very visible pine to aspen forestlands transition. Mount Rushmore and the Park Service have seen the data; they have the opportunity to lead by reducing pine stands, reintroducing fire, and saving their own aspen.
From the Rapid City Journal: “From a socio-economic perspective, the existence of so much private land has caused forest managers to fear fire, prompting even greater fire suppression and more commercial logging and thinning for fuels reduction and breaks. While this may make landowners feel more secure, these activities have not and will not maintain the natural processes that regulate the health and the vitality of this ponderosa pine forest. Unquestionably, private development has also contributed to the cultural loss and impoverishment of the Lakota Nation who claim the Black Hills under treaties broken by the U.S. Government.”
From the USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station: “Aspen could disappear from the North American continent by 2090.”
Connect the dots.