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Ghost Forests of Yellowstone
By Adam Markham, President, Clean Air-Cool Planet
In the last week of September I hiked Yellowstone’s Avalanche Peak with retired forest service entomologist, Jesse Logan. The whitebark pine forests of this and other high country trails in Yellowstone used to be among the jewels of the park, but as Jesse and I left the mixed Douglas fir and pine forest of the lower slopes and gained elevation, it quickly became evident that those days are gone and they are not likely coming back. Where a few years ago there was a healthy whitebark pine forest, now there were only the ghostly white skeletons of dead pines. Where there should have been Stellar’s nutcrackers swooping through the forest canopy to feast on a rich harvest of seeds and the chatter of red squirrels scurrying around in the branches collecting pine cones, there was only silence. We saw two nutcrackers and one squirrel where a few years ago there would have been thousands. Climate change in the form of warm winters and longer summers has enabled mountain pine beetle populations to reduce these once vibrant forests to tree graveyards.
Retired forest service entomologist Jesse Logan indicates the extent of dead whitebark forests on the slopes surrounding Avalanche Peak in Yellowstone. Credit: Adam Markham
Earlier, we’d met two tourists at the trailhead and they had been nervously asking about the danger of encountering grizzly bears in this rugged territory. Jesse reassured the hikers about the low chance of a bear encounter, but he didn’t explain to them that this was because pine beetles had devastated the whitebark pines and that now there was no food source to attract them into the forest.
Beetle trails and empty brood chambers exposed beneath the bark of a dead whitebark pine. Credit: Adam Markham
Later, reflecting on the day over a beer at the bar of the Pahaska Tepee – Buffalo Bill’s old hunting lodge on the road back to Cody, Wyoming – we realized we had missed an opportunity with those hikers to educate two more people about the eco-catastrophe that is hitting the West. Everybody needs to hear about the death of the whitebark pine forests, and they need to hear soon. The damage to the trees is unprecedented and far worse than most scientists believed it ever could get. A decade ago, Jesse Logan was almost the only one sounding the alarm bells and now he’s one of the few that have recognized that this is an indicator of change that we all should heed.
Whitebark pines are keystone species for high elevation ecosystems throughout the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. A healthy whitebark forest supports not just the nutcrackers, other birds and squirrels, but also the black bears and grizzlies that gorge themselves on the nutritious pine nuts robbed from the huge middens where squirrels store countless cones each fall. Jesse Logan and his colleagues Wally Macfarlane and Willie Kern have surveyed the forests of the GYE and found that 95% of whitebark pine forest in the region is experiencing mortality caused by mountain pine beetle. Warmer winters are allowing the beetles to survive the winters in greater numbers and higher summer temperatures are enabling them to complete a full life-cycle in one season. These are the conditions behind the massive ongoing outbreak of beetle-driven forest death.
A ghost forest of whitebark pine on the trail to Avalanche Peak. Credit: Adam Markham
As we emerged from the dense forest of grotesque dead sticks and snags into the open basin leading to the high ridge and scree of Avalanche Peak at 10,560 feet, we could see the extent of the dead forest spreading out before us in every direction. The scale of the damage is truly stunning. The day we topped Avalanche Peak the visibility was pretty good, even after a summer of fires that held smoke haze in the air across the western states. We could see way past Mount Washburn 25 miles to the northwest and Grand Teton more than 40 miles to the southwest. Scouring the closer mountainsides with our binoculars, we picked out dozens of slopes covered in the gray ghost forests – clear victims of the beetles. These dead vast tracts of dead forests represent not just crippled ecosystems in the high mountains, but also are having direct impacts down in the valleys where people live. Healthy whitebark pine forests play an important role in the water cycle. The trees act as windbreaks, helping to regulate the distribution of windblown snow in the mountains, and the forest canopy helps shade the snow, slowing melt rates in the spring. Without the protection of the living forest, peak spring stream flow occurs earlier and lasts for a shorter time. Hydrological disruptions such as these have huge consequences for water resource management in the west – and at a time when climate change is already disrupting rainfall patterns.
Ancient whitebark pines killed by the recent mountain pine beetle outbreak stand on a windy ridge in Yellowstone National Park. Credit: Adam Markham
As we trudged down the mountain again, pausing occasionally to pry the dead bark from a stricken giant and examine the trails of the tiny killer beetles and their brood galleries just below the surface, it was hard not to feel powerless in the face of this tragic loss of climax forest. Some of the dead trees we were seeing were hundreds of years old. Whitebark pine is a species which has to be more than 50 years old before it bears cones, and yet in these ghost forests, none of the older, cone-bearing trees were being spared from the ravages of the beetles. There is an urgent need for more monitoring and surveying of the current outbreak, and for volunteers to participate in projects like those of the grassroots organization Treefight which is educating people about whitebark forests, conducting surveys and organizing re-planting programs.
The death of these spectacular forests provides as clear an example of a canary in the coal mine as anyone could wish. The loss of these forests is a climate signal as strong and as alarming as the melting of the Arctic sea ice, and we should pay heed because it’s right in our own back yard. The question is: Can we rise to the challenge at last and slow global warming before it’s too late?
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: ecosystems, impacts of climate change, whitebark pine, Yellowstone 
2012-10-09 16:02:07
Source: http://coolplanet.org/2012/10/09/ghost-forests-of-yellowstone/
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