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A Sea of Red
Welcome to the sub-boreal: gateway to biodiversity’s best hope and its worst nightmare.
The view appears to be stunning. A forested mountainside alive with colour – reds looking like an Algonquin fall foliage explosion.
But it’s spring and while it might be colourful, it’s anything but alive.
The sea of red you see across this sub-boreal forest is in fact a sea of dead trees, laid to waste by the mountain pine beetle. What should be unrivalled habitat for numerous species is now an increasingly fragile eco-region.
You see, each eco-region has its own unique geography – specific environmental conditions tailor-made for some species while providing critical seasonal habitat or food sources for others.
The sub-boreal? It’s Mount Robson’s superstar eco-region. A relatively dry landscape – home to douglas fir and lodgepole pine – it’s the stepping stone to the larger boreal forest ecosystem that spreads out east from the Rockies, covering much of Canada and the northern hemisphere.
The sub-boreal and boreal are biodiversity’s best hope; they’re also critical to economies near and far.
More than 50% the size of the Amazon rainforest and accounting for 33% of the world’s forests – 75% of which are in Canada – the boreal has more biomass, or life per square inch, than anywhere in the world and it’s one of our most important carbon sinks.
Unlike the inland rainforest down valley or the temperate rainforest of Canada’s west coast, because this eco-region’s climate is dry, the sub-boreal forest is one that is constantly in flux.
It requires constant regeneration through fire – and, yes, even the pine beetle – to seed new, healthier trees, release nutrients and sustain the flora that fauna across the larger ecosystem needs to survive.
So what’s
the problem?
During the earlier part of the last century, society worked to suppress wildfires. We took away a naturally reoccurring tool from nature that helped keep this type of ecosystem in check.
Think of it like this:
The grizzly bear – it’s a keystone species, an animal that impacts all life where it lives and, in many ways, is the super glue that holds the entire ecosystem together.
Wildfire, according to Dr. Mike Flannigan – one of the world’s experts on wildland fire – is a keystone process. With it, it kills insects, disease and allows for all species across all ecosystems to thrive.
Without wildfires, the forest becomes too uniform and dense – and the eco-region loses a critical fail-safe.
How’s that?
The mountain pine beetle, you see, actually serves an important purpose. Normally a tree’s defense is a type of toxin that will prevent a handful of beetles from attacking. Unhealthy trees though? They can’t put up the fight and the pine beetle kills them, making way for newer, healthier trees without affecting the entire forest stand.
But without fires to manage the beetle’s population, suddenly there were a lot more pine beetles; suddenly it was able to overcome a tree’s defense with numbers. Healthy trees began to die and the beetle started to spread.
What could stop the beetles? The last fail-safe: Cold winters.
Prolonged, extreme cold – the kind common in the sub-boreal – kills the beetle outright and gives the forest a chance to reseed and regrow.
But the winters aren’t as cold as they once were. And for a good portion of the 90s and 2000s, a lack of cold winters allowed the beetle to spread its sea of red across British Columbia – one of the worst hit regions in the world.
In total, 18 million hectares were affected; 60% of pine forest could no longer be forested; the logging industry and communities were in disarray.
The crisis in BC has peaked – mostly because the beetle did its damage – but its left a tinderbox in its wake, creating the potential for unnatural super fires that, as we’ve already seen, are devastating for people and wildlife.
And that’s not the worst of it.
The beetle appears to be marching – and blowing with the wind, thanks to increasingly challenging weather – into the boreal forest proper, taking on trees that don’t have that special toxin that at least attempts to defend against the pine beetle.
If the pine beetle gets a foothold in the boreal, it could spread across the continent north, east and south – increasing the risk of super fires, turning carbon sinks into carbon emitters, devastating resource economies and destroying critical components of the food chain – whitebark pine seeds, say – that could threaten those keystone species, like the grizzly.
Background image courtesy of SFU Communications and Marketing “Pine beetle infested forest”
I asked
Dr. Flannigan
What should we do? Log infested trees, even if they’re in parks like Mount Robson? Spark more controlled fires to try to create barriers and kill the beetle in the hardest hit areas?
His answer? “It depends.”
Each prescription comes with a consequence – some economic, some environmental. And getting that balance right is why we need more Dr. Flannigans, who acknowledges the biggest challenge is that he’s only one person and there are only so many hours in the day.
It’s also why we all need to better understand the ecology of eco-regions like the sub-boreal, no matter how boring it might seem. If we don’t understand the ramifications of our actions, we can’t help – or support – policymakers in making the right decisions; we can’t effectively contribute to what will be increasingly important decisions no matter where we live in Canada.
And as history has taught us, we live in ignorance of hard decisions at our own peril.
Image courtesy of SFU Communications and Marketing “Pine beetle”
