Bark beetles continue to be in the news as the little critters’ footprints appear across large swaths of pine trees in the western United States.
Oregon
Here is an excerpt from an article at Oregonlive.com about an infested area known as the “red zone”:
As cooler, wetter weather takes hold across Oregon, relieved foresters say the state once again sidestepped a catastrophic fire in what’s called the “red zone” – a 300,000-acre section of the Fremont-Winema National Forest in Klamath and Lake counties.
A pine bark beetle infestation has decimated vast stands of lodgepole pine there, providing plenty of explosive fuel. Foresters and firefighters held their breath when lightning storms swept through in August, sparking numerous fires but sparing the Fremont-Winema.
Although a decade or more in the making, the beetle infestation and resulting damage is getting a fresh look. The Oregon Board of Forestry toured the red zone Sept. 8, and industry groups have asked the board and Gov. John Kitzhaber to intervene with federal agencies. Private timber owners have twin worries: The beetle outbreak has damaged their trees, and they believe a monstrous fire in the federal forest will consume their land as well.
Environmental groups and some forestry professionals view the beetle damage, while severe, as a natural, cyclical occurrence. Forests across the West are struggling with the beetle plague.
“Bugs in lodgepole, that’s kind of what they do,” said Sean Stevens, spokesman for Oregon Wild. “The public looks at it and gasps, but in 50 years there will be a new lodgepole forest growing up in its place.”
The U.S. Forest Service is clearing “safety corridors” along roads and has long-range plans to strategically reduce the fuel load of dead trees in the Fremont-Winema, Deputy Forest Supervisor Rick Newton said.
“Certainly we’re very concerned,” he said. “It’s hard to watch a beetle epidemic such as this one move across an area.”
South Dakota
Some areas in the Black Hills have been heavily visited by the bark beetles. Frank Carroll, the Planning and Public Affairs Staff of the Black Hills National Forest, recently told us about what to us is a new and user friendly method for visualizing the impacts geographically. If you download and open this 2 MB Google Earth file it will display icons superimposed on satellite imagery at the locations aerial photos were taken of bark beetle impacts. When you click on the icons you will see images like the one above. If you don’t have Google Earth yet (why don’t you have it?), you can download the program here.
This technology could be very useful for displaying photos taken of a large wildfire.
CDF did a large survey of the state of the southern California forests at risk in 2007-2008. Products included image mosaics and classifications of live vs dead vegetation at that time. Several dozen gigabytes of imagery is summarized and presented for browsing on this Website (http://www.fireimaging.com/mapping/2007/california/cdf/index.html) and includes KML links for Google Earth. You can zoom in on any area, click and record the geographic coordinates for objects of interest using the Zoomify browser without Google Earth. Prior to this survey, ‘sketch maps’ were drawn by airborne observers on topo maps to delineate areas of beetle kill. Similar maps probably go with the pictures shown in the SD example above.
Data was collected in Oregon this summer for a study investigating the possibility of using this remote sensing technology to detect infested trees before they die and turn red.
Thermal imagery of active fires has been posted on this website for many years, and includes imagery in a Zoomify browser, Google Earth links and Google Maps embedded browsers. Here’s a nice example from 2007- http://www.fireimaging.com/fires/2007/california/butler2/258/index.html.