What is a Mountain Pine Beetle?
The mountain pine beetle (MPB) is a species of bark beetle native to the forests of western North America from Mexico to central British Columbia. It has a hard black exoskeleton and measures about 5 millimeters, about the size of a grain of rice. It’s amazing that something so small can cause so much damage, decimating healthy forests across entire regions. This damage can translate not only to dead trees, but increased wildfire danger affecting communities adjacent to those forests. The resulting economic impacts can be devastating to homeowners, wildlife and watersheds.
Mountain pine beetles inhabit pines, particularly the Ponderosa Pine, Lodgepole Pine, Whitebark Pine, Scots Pine and Limber Pine. During early stages of an outbreak, attacks are limited largely to trees under stress from injury, poor site conditions, fire damage, overcrowding, root disease or old age. As beetle populations increase, the beetles attack the largest trees in the outbreak area.
Why do we care?
The beetles kill the trees by boring through the bark into the phloem layer on which they feed and in which eggs are laid. Pioneer female beetles initiate attacks, and produce pheromones which attract other beetles and results in mass attack. The trees respond to attack by increasing their resin output in order to discourage or kill the beetles. It isn’t the number of pitch-out tubes that kill the pine tree but the beetles carry blue stain fungi which, if established, will block the tree resin response. Over time (usually within 2 weeks of attack), the trees are overwhelmed as the phloem layer is damaged enough to cut off the flow of water and nutrients. In the end, the trees starve to death, and the damage can be easily seen from the air in the form of reddened needles. Entire groves of trees after an outbreak will appear reddish for this reason. Usually, the older trees die first. After particularly long and hot summers, the mountain pine beetle population can increase dramatically, which leads to the deforestation of large areas.
7Q10 has the expertise to conduct assessment of MPB damage to forests by using remotely sensed data and image processing tools to identify, quantify, and project and monitor MPB spread and damage over time, and to analyze consequences of MPB damage on water quality and supply, habitat quality and recreational values using or by distributed models within GIS to assess risks at the watershed level.