Posted on 08/08/2006 11:52:38 AM PDT by george76
Experts paint grim picture for local trees, eye future forest..
It seems there’s just not much good news for trees these days...
Pine beetles decimating lodgepole pines across the West ...foresters are already looking ahead to what the landscape will look like in the future.
“This mature pine forest is a goner,” said Cal Wettstein, district ranger for the Holy Cross and Eagle ranger districts. “We’re focusing on the next forest.”
Asked what the future holds...Wettstein said simply “large fires.”
Over the next two decades, the beetle-killed trees will shed their needles and their branches, then fall down and contribute to a tremendous load of fuel on the forest floor, Wettstein said. At that point, he said, it’s a waiting game as to when the combination of fuel, weather and a spark culminates in a large-scale fire.
“It’s not if, but when,” Wettstein said.
Referencing other large fires in recent years, he said the factors that cause them are often decades in the making.
The Big Fish fire in the Flattops Wilderness four years ago, for example, followed a spruce beetle outbreak in the 1950s...
The Yellowstone fires in the 1980s were set up by conditions dating back to the 1930s.
“It’s inevitable,” he said. “We can’t treat it all.”
Wettstein pointed out that, following a pine-beetle outbreak in the early 1980s, entomologists recommended clear-cutting large swaths of forest to stimulate new growth and forest diversity.
The suggestion was to cut some 52,000 acres of forest between Vail and Summit counties, he said, but only about 1,200 acres was cut in that period.
“The entomologist predicted this exactly,” ...
“But the social and political atmosphere being what it is — here we are.”
(Excerpt) Read more at vaildaily.com ...
Remember... There is only one Sierra...
stop importing poverty stricken third world people illegally, and give the ecosystem a chance.
Yes, but you know that's been the main tactic of Leftist, Liberals, EnvironMentals, Commyoonists, and Luddites like Algore and Ted Kazinsky since time began, right? (don't answer, get some rest. It was a rhetorical question anyways)
don't answer, get some rest. It was a rhetorical question anyways
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Ok. Good night.
The really nutty part is that we have hired all of them to "manage' our forests.
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