Much as been written about the impacts of mountain pine beetles on forests and how beetle-killed trees would affect wildfire management. Wildfire Today has covered this before.
The Times News of Twin Falls, Idaho, has an interesting article about the beetle outbreak. Here is an excerpt:
“…Overall in this area, (the mountain pine beetles have) been outbreaking since around 2000, going on 11 years,” said Laura Lazarus, a forest entomologist with the Forest Service’s Forest Health Protection office in Boise. The mountain pine outbreaks typically subside in an average of 12 years.
Lazarus acknowledged that the visual impact of the beetle kill — the hillsides full of dead, red-needled trees — looks bad to the untrained eye. However, because the beetles only target trees of a certain size, there are plenty remaining to repopulate the forest over time.
“It’s very shocking right now, but it’ll be fine in the long-term,” she said. “Really, we’re just left with younger stands of trees. Generally, those trees will grow more vigorously. I don’t always see it as a bad thing.”
However, Lazarus, [Kurt Nelson, district ranger at the Forest Service’s Ketchum ranger district] and their colleagues are paying close attention to where the beetles are active, in part to know where dead needles and fallen trees are adding to the fuel load for a potential wildfire.
“It does change our fire regimes in terms of how often and how large a fire could occur if the right conditions occur,” Nelson said. “It’s all connected and we need to recognize there are some things we may not be able to control but we can manage in terms of what we might anticipate.”
