In California’s Sierra Nevada, western pine beetle infestations amped up by global warming were found to kill 30% more ponderosa pine trees than the beetles do under drought alone. A new supercomputer modeling study hints at the grim prospect of future catastrophic tree die-offs and offers insights for mitigating the combined risk of wildfires and insect outbreaks.
“Forests represent a crucial buffer against warming climate and are often touted as an inexpensive mitigation strategy against climate change,” said Zachary Robbins, a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory, graduate student at North Carolina State University, and lead author of the paper on beetles and ponderosa pine tree die-offs. “Our research shows that warming shortens the time between beetle generations, supercharging beetle population growth. That can then spur catastrophic mortality in forest systems during drought in the Sierra Nevada and throughout the Western United States.”
In the recently published study in Global Change Biology, Robbins and his collaborators developed a new modeling framework to assess the risk western pine beetles, or bark beetles, pose in many forest ecosystems under climate change. If the effects of compromised tree defenses (15% to 20%) and increased bark beetle populations (20%) are additive, the team determined that 35% to 40% more ponderosa pines would die from beetle attacks for each degree Celsius of warming.
“Our study is the first to attribute a level of tree mortality to the direct effect of warming on bark beetles, using a model that captures both beetle reproduction and development rates and host stress,” Robbins said. “We found that even slight increases in the number of annual generations of bark beetles due to warming can significantly increase tree mortality during drought.”
Using Los Alamos supercomputers, the team modeled bark beetle dynamics and tree die-off during the extreme drought of 2012-2015 and earlier periods. Then they investigated those results using field observations of maximum and minimum temperature, precipitation, tree density, tree mortality, and beetle flight initiation (when fully developed beetles leave their tree of origin) along with lab studies on beetle rate of development.
They found that a quicker rate of producing new generations of off-spring contributed more to killer infestations than did surviving the winter in the absence of cold temperatures fatal to the beetle, yet, surprisingly, the increase in the number of generations was not very big.
“In the Sierra, we saw only about one-third more generations per year, but that really amplified mortality,” Robbins said. “It shows that a small impact in the success of these populations can have a big impact on tree mortality, where we previously thought the beetle needed one whole generation increase to substantially impact mortality.
“These findings should generally apply to many species of pine forests around the West, although the beetle species might be different,” said Chonggang Xu, coauthor of the paper. A senior scientist at Los Alamos, Xu simulates forest-vegetation dynamics in his research.
“Beetle-instigated die-off may cause forests to act as carbon sources to the atmosphere for decades,” Xu said. “Dead trees don’t absorb CO2 but release carbon to the atmosphere. This could potentially raise global forecasts of atmospheric carbon, which has not yet been explicitly considered in current-generation earth-system models.”
The research also has implications for forest management under climate change.
“A mechanistic understanding of the interactions among climate, forests, and disturbances can improve the planning of forest management actions and better predict the effects of climate change on biological systems,” Robbins said.
Older, bigger ponderosas are particularly vulnerable to beetle attacks because their size supports large infestations, Xu said, while younger, smaller trees can survive.
“A diverse forest that combines small and big trees and species diversity, as well, is more resilient,” Xu said. He pointed out that forest management to minimize wildfire risk often removes the smaller trees and preserves the larger ones, “which creates a forest of big trees. Then the beetle comes and the trees could be devastated at the same time.”
Bark beetles kill trees worldwide by chewing through bark and depositing their larvae in the inner bark. An increasing number of beetle outbreaks in the past two decades have devastated forests across the American West, including New Mexico, striking nearly 11 million acres nationwide and threatening the basic structure and ecological processes of some forests.
The beetles exploit the warming, drying climate in the West. When precipitation and temperature remain at historic levels, trees can defend themselves from infestation, but drought often sparks bark beetle outbreaks. That is because water-stressed trees suppress their photosynthesis, close their stoma, and grow more slowly, depleting their carbon storage, which may weaken their defenses.
The life-cycle of the beetle depends on temperature under the bark and in the air. Warmer temperatures reduce the number of beetles killed off by deep winter cold and accelerate and extend the breeding season. Outbreaks finally collapse when bark beetles exhaust the supply of susceptible trees, acutely cold temperatures kill off the beetles, or predators and parasites decimate bark beetle populations.
The study considered historic and contemporary temperature trends in a broad swath of the Sierra Nevada, including several national forests and Kings Canyon, Sequoia, and Yosemite National Parks.
In a new approach, the team used a model of the breeding cycles and population dynamics of bark beetles. The team incorporated this model into a tree-death and insect-attack model, which accounts for the number of bark beetles in flight, the number and size of trees available as hosts, and the drought. The models were validated against data from field observations.
Paper: “Warming increased bark beetle-induced tree mortality by 30% during an extreme drought in California,” by Zachary J. Robbins, Chonggang Xu, Brian H. Aukema, Polly C. Buotte, Rutuja Chitra-Tarak, Christopher J. Fettig, Michael L. Goulden, Devin W. Goodsman, Alexander D. Hall, Charles D. Koven, Lara M. Kueppers, Gavin D. Madakumbura, Leif A. Mortenson, James A. Powell, Robert M. Scheller, in Global Change Biology. DOI: 10.1111/gcb.15927.
Funding: University of California National Laboratory Fees Research Program at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
From Los Alamos National Laboratory. The paper, funded by taxpayers, is not open source. Copies are priced at $59.
Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Mike.
The paper is open access and can be found here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.15927
Greta Thunberg: A year to change the world is an hour program everyone has to see and really understand. In Feb 2022; in the USA, you can’t get two people to agree it’s February. Scientists have been trying to get awareness of the situation since very early on. Greta said “World leaders are acting like children; so we(young people) have to be the adults… Is it any wonder why she became the sensation she deserves. If America ever needed a uniter, well she should continue working on this much needed effort…
Thank you for the thoughts. I’d like to see some data on the seedling stock used for ponderosas. We noticed frequent heart rot in mid-life stands in western Montana. And sometime the ponderosa would snap off around the top third of the tree. The first answer we found was that the seed stock was at the chosen for its physical attributes, but there was no consideration in regard to the location of the source of seed stock. This was from an effort to replant from the 1910 fires and a few years beyond. You just don’t find any of the trees at the yellow belly stage in this area. When you see green leafed trees burn to consumption, from a pile burn, you’ve got to ask questions. I hope restoring these stands to multi-generational stands will help restore the defense abilities of the trees.
Are these findings about the beetle infestations showing to be universal in the experimental forests?
Generally speaking, the best way to protect your trees is to make sure they are getting enough water where they can fight off the beetles themselves by pitching them out. Thinning to a lower density or supplemental watering can help. Additionally, there are pheromone packets available from forestry suppliers that mimic the smell that the beetles give off to say that a tree is dead and move on to the next one (http://dnrc.mt.gov/divisions/forestry/forestry-assistance/pest-management/bark-beetle-pheromones). There should be a forestry extension agent either through the local university or state forest agency that could discuss more specifics for your local.
This year, my husband and I had to cut down 2 pine trees due to pine bark beetle in East Texas. I did not know about this pest and how devastating it can be to pine trees until we had to spend $1500 to remove these 2 trees. I am a high school science teacher and hope to hear/ read of how to protect our other pine trees on our 6 acre property.
Hi WILDRIRETODAY Readers,
Until I read about this article about ‘bark beetles’ being the cause of ponderosa pines mortality, I had not read about ‘bark ‘beetles’ being a serious problem to ponderosa pine trees. But I certainly had read about the ‘bark beetle’ problem relative to ‘lodgepole pine’ trees.
““These findings should generally apply to many species of pine forests around the West, although the beetle species might be different,” said Chonggang Xu, coauthor of the paper. A senior scientist at Los Alamos, Xu simulates forest-vegetation dynamics in his research.”
Beginning with the thickness of their barks, there are other well known difference between the ponderosa pine and the lodgepole pine trees. So I would like to see a comparison of the tree mortality of these two pines due to bark beetles of any kind.
Have a good day, Jerry
I havent been to the Black Hills in a long time, but last time I was there pine beetles were kicking its butt and ponderosa pine is the predominant species there.
Equally the fear of the Mountain pine beatle( which likes the Lodge pole) now going after its cousin the Jack Pine. We need a brutal cold snap (at just the right time) to put them in check as they now have a clear run to the Atlantic.
We had lots of PP mortality from beetles in Eastern Oregon during the late 1970s.
Oh yes, depending where you look. I have worked among bark beetle impacted cedar, PP, Doug fir, and lodgepole. And although I do not have the data at my fingertips, it would not be hard to find research with a breakdown by species of bark beetle mortality. It is definitely in the literature, although perhaps not in silviculture related literature you have read. As a silviculturist that I used to work with in R2 used to say when asked by the media if he could show them bb impacted forest – “Give me a half an hour and I’ll show you four different species dying from bark beetles.”