Pinebark beetle damage in pine forests of Colorado, USA as seen from NASA's Landsat satellite
A single pine bark beetle is about the size of a grain of rice. But when the beetle population swells, it can have a major impact on forest health. And that’s exactly what has been happening across the Rocky Mountains over the past decade. In Colorado, severe beetle infestations showed up in lodgepole pine forests about 50 miles west of Boulder and Fort Collins around 2000. Over time, the affected area grew so that by 2011 the infestation had spread east to ponderosa pine forests that were much closer to the two cities. (A map showing the progression between 1998 and 2011 is available here). The beetle epidemic caused so many trees to die-off that the impacts are visible from space. The Thematic Mapper on Landsat 5 acquired these images of lodgepole pine forests near Grand Lake, Colorado on September 11, 2005, and September 28, 2011—before and after a severe infestation led to die-off of the tree canopy. Over six years, beetle activity turned entire ridges and valleys brown. Forest die-off is most visible in the center of the image and along both sides of the Kawuneeche Valley. The brownest areas in the 2011 image are generally stands of lodgepole pine, a slender tree that grows at 6,000 to 11,000 feet (1,800 to 3,300 meters) in elevation. Either spruce or aspen dominates the green areas that escaped infestation, such as the forests near Gravel Mountain and areas west of the Kawuneeche Valley. Not all of the browning is due to beetles. In the upper central and lower right of the image, logging has also had an impact. And despite the beetle damage to the upper canopy, the forests are anything but dead. Even in the most severely affected areas, large numbers of trees survive. It has been suggested that all the dead needles and trees trunk left after a beetle infestation must make wildfires more common and severe. It wasn’t uncommon for beetles to get the blame for exacerbating the destructive High Park fire that raged near Fort Collin in June 2012.
Size: 2507px × 4650px
Photo credit: © B.A.E. Inc. / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
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