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Alberta May Be Holding the Line Against Forest Munching Mountain Pine Beetle

Posted on: Friday, 28 September 2007, 21:00 CDT

By Bob Weber, THE CANADIAN PRESS

EDMONTON - Alberta may finally be holding the line against the forest-munching ravages of the mountain pine beetle.

Results of a new beetle population survey suggest that between 200,000 and 300,000 additional trees were hit by the bugs in the province this year, Ted Morton, Alberta's minister of sustainable resource development, said Friday.

That is a considerable improvement over 2006, when the number of infected trees shot from 19,000 to three million.

The hope is that the new figures mean the pine beetle's relentless eastward march may have slowed.

Morton told the Alberta Forest Products Association in a speech in Jasper, Alta., that despite the promising numbers he will be asking for more money to continue fighting the beetle.

"We got $50 million last year and I'm looking for a similar amount for the year ahead," Morton said.

There is evidence that the number of bugs in northwestern Alberta is holding steady but the infestation is spreading in the south.

Estimates have suggested that the bugs endanger up to $23 billion worth of timber in Alberta and the province has used aggressive measures to stop them at the British Columbia boundary.

Wide swaths of forest in their immediate path have been tagged for prescribed burns, including 1,300 hectares near Mount Nestor, south of Canmore, Alta., an area that straddles Banff National Park and the provincial Spray Valley park. It will be one of the largest prescribed burns ever in the region.

But Alberta has also received plenty of help from the weather - and a quirk in the bugs' biology.

Previously, it was thought thermometers had to drop to -40 C to kill off the beetles.

But the bugs don't produce the antifreeze-like substance that keeps them alive through such temperatures until well into the winter. A spell of -20 C weather last November caught them before they were ready, with welcome results.

That timely cold snap left very few beetles alive higher than a metre or so up the trees.

Alberta also escaped freak winds that brought millions of bugs over the mountains from B.C. last year. The few weeks when the critters are migrating are gone, so the chances of another such massive influx are remote.

The news from B.C., however, is less optimistic.

A recent government report predicted the mountain pine beetle will kill more than three-quarters of B.C.'s marketable pine forests within the next eight years. The report said if the pine beetle kill continues at its current rate, it will kill the equivalent of almost one-quarter of the province's entire volume of market timber.

So far, the mountain pine beetle has killed 530 million cubic metres of pine trees, said the report.

B.C.'s forest industry is worth more than $4 billion to the economy.

Experts predict it'll be another five or six years before the B.C. epidemic eases. By that time, they say, the bugs will have eaten themselves to death by killing all the older host trees. The population there is then likely to collapse within itself.

Source: Canadian Press

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