Debate over beetle-kill pine burns as bugs move to Colorado’s Front Range

Jefferson Dodge in the Boulder Weekly: ...There is fresh debate about what to do with the millions of acres of pine trees in the West that have been destroyed by the mountain pine beetle. And it is a debate that is bleeding over into a battle about how to best protect Colorado’s roadless areas.

…It’s too late to do much to stop them, and once they’ve turned a pine forest from a lovely green to that ugly reddish brown, the question becomes, “What we should do with all of those dead trees?” One response has been to log or at least thin the dead forests, in the name of reducing the risk of forest fires. Surely all of those dead trees are a tinderbox just waiting for a spark, right?

Recently a group of scientists blew the whistle and said not so fast. In a report titled “Insects and Roadless Forests: A Scientific Review of Causes, Consequences and Management Alternatives,” four researchers concluded that the fire danger in beetlekill pine forests has been greatly exaggerated. … The report also found that logging or thinning in secluded roadless areas neither controls future beetle outbreaks nor helps protect communities and homes from forest fires. The key to protecting inhabited areas from fire damage, the scientists say, is to clear the immediate area — about 120 feet — around homes and other structures. And the environmental damage that is done by building roads into the backcountry wilderness to log or thin beetle-kill pine far outweighs any fire-prevention benefits, they say in their report.

…Joe Duda, forest management supervisor for the Colorado State Forest Service (CSFS), is one of the experts who points to the mountain pine beetle’s recent invasion of Larimer County — which accounted for about half of the state’s increase in beetle activity this past year — as evidence that the northern Front Range is one of the bugs’ next targets. “We expect we’ll see more,” he says, noting that there are still dense stands of pines from Boulder County to the Wyoming border.

…But Duda calls the scientists’ recent report “a great oversimplification of all the issues we as land managers have to deal with.” Duda and Stein say the fire mitigation issue is more complicated than most people know, since fire danger changes with each phase of the beetle-kill pine’s deterioration. For example, the threat of a forest fire is higher when the brown trees still have their needles, and it goes down after those needles fall, but then the danger goes back up after a decade or two, when ground fuel is heavy with all of the dead trees that have fallen and the new ones coming up…..

A stand of trees that very far gone in the beetle infection cycle, north of Breckenridge, Colorado, looking east. Shot by Hustvedt, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license