Latest Mountain pine beetle Stories
Twenty researchers — more than half of them Simon Fraser University graduates and/or faculty — could become eastern Canada’s knights in shining white lab coats. A paper detailing their newly created sequencing of the mountain pine beetle’s (MPB) genome will be gold in the hands of scientists trying to stem the beetle’s invasion into eastern forests. The journal Genome Biology has published the paper. “We know a lot about how beetle infestations can devastate forests, just as...
BioMed Central The sequencing and assembly of the genome of the mountain pine beetle, Dendroctonus ponderosae, is published online this week in Genome Biology. The species is native to North America, where it is currently wreaking havoc in an area of forest ten times larger than previous outbreaks. This paper determines genes that may be involved in colonizing the trees, such as enzymes for degrading plant cell walls, and identifies potential sex chromosomes in the beetle. D. ponderosae...
A research team involving several scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder has found an unexpected silver lining in the devastating pine beetle outbreaks ravaging the West: Such events do not harm water quality in adjacent streams as scientists had previously believed. According to CU-Boulder team member Professor William Lewis, the new study shows that smaller trees and other vegetation that survive pine beetle invasions along waterways increase their uptake of nitrate, a common...
Trees and the insects that eat them wage constant war. Insects burrow and munch; trees deploy lethal and disruptive defenses in the form of chemicals. But in a warming world, where temperatures and seasonal change are in flux, the tide of battle may be shifting in some insects' favor, according to a new study. In a report published today (Dec. 31, 2012) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison reports a rising...
University of Colorado Boulder Beetles then moved into wetter and higher elevations A new University of Colorado Boulder study shows for the first time that episodes of reduced precipitation in the southern Rocky Mountains, especially during the 2001-02 drought, greatly accelerated development of the mountain pine beetle epidemic. The study, the first ever to chart the evolution of the current pine beetle epidemic in the southern Rocky Mountains, compared patterns of beetle outbreak...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A conspiracy between Nature’s forces has sent walls of fire ripping through Colorado sending residents, officials, and first responders scrambling into action. One of the more devastating fires, the Waldo Canyon fire, has forced more than 32,000 people in and around Colorado’s second-most-populous city of Colorado Springs from their homes. The blaze, which began Saturday, is just 15 percent contained, according to the daily...
New research concludes that a one-two punch of drought and mountain pine beetle attacks are the primary forces that have killed more than 2.5 million acres of pinyon pine and juniper trees in the American Southwest during the past 15 years, setting the stage for further ecological disruption. The widespread dieback of these tree species is a special concern, scientists say, because they are some of the last trees that can hold together a fragile ecosystem, nourish other plant and animal...
The hordes of bark beetles that have bored their way through more than 6 billion trees in the western U.S. and British Columbia since the 1990s do more than damage and kill stately pine, spruce and other trees. A new study finds that these pests can make trees release up to 20 times more of the organic substances that foster haze and air pollution in forested areas. It appears in ACS' journal Environmental Science & Technology. Kara Huff Hartz, Gannet Hallar and colleagues explain that...
Shortleaf pine-hardwood ecosystem restoration following insect outbreak Research by USDA Forest Service Southern Research Station (SRS) scientists shows that the impacts of recent outbreaks of southern pine beetle further degraded shortleaf pine-hardwood forest ecosystems in the southern Appalachian region. The authors suggest that cutting and burning these sites reduces heavy fuel loads, improves soil nutrient status, and opens the canopy for restoration of these shortleaf pine...
WOBURN, Mass., April 25, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The gold rush of tree care has arrived in California! Today Arborjet (www.arborjet.com), which develops remedies for some of the world's most destructive tree insects and diseases, announced that the company's industry-leading trunk injection products, TREE-age® Insecticide* and PHOSPHO-jet Fungicide, have received registration from the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (CDPR) and are now labeled for use in the state. Now...
