Aerial view of mountain pine beetle damage.
Galleries made by mountain pine beetles.
Mountain pine beetle
Reciprocal interactions between bark beetles and wildfire in subalpine forests: landscape patterns and the risk of high-severity fire
Contacts
Keywords
Mountain Pine Beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae), insect outbreaks, fire
ecology, fuel management, fire risk, disturbance interactions, subalpine
forests
Project Summary
Understanding how natural disturbances influence the structure and function of forested ecosystems remains a priority of land managers and research scientists. Although previous work has characterized the independent effects of wildfire and bark beetle epidemics, both of which are ecologically important natural disturbances in the Intermountain West, very little is known about how these two phenomena interact. For example, it is widely believed that tree mortality resulting from beetle outbreaks increases the likelihood of severe fires, yet few studies have rigorously tested this hypothesis. Similarly, trees weakened, but not killed by fire are thought to be more susceptible to beetle invasion but empirical evidence for this is rare.
Our proposed research would contribute to understanding the reciprocal effects of wildfire and beetle outbreaks on forest ecosystem structure, and how these interactions affect subsequent fires and spread of insects. Our previous work has documented the structural heterogeneity created by large, severe fires, as well as the variability in ecosystem characteristics such as species diversity, aboveground productivity, and nitrogen dynamics. We propose to build upon this previous work to study the interactions of these two disturbance types. The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) is currently experiencing a widespread outbreak of mountain pine beetle (MPB, Dendroctonus ponderosae), along with other beetle species, e.g., spruce beetle (Dendroctonus rufipennis), Douglas-fir beetle (Dendroctonus pseudotsugae), in the vicinity of extensive fires that burned during the past five years, providing a timely opportunity to study these interactions (Figure 1). We propose to combine intensive field studies, broad-scale analyses based on satellite imagery and simulation modeling to describe the spatial patterns of current beetle outbreaks, and the reciprocal interactions of each disturbance on the pattern and severity of the other.
Read more about related research being conducted in the Turner lab....
Key Findings
First field season took place in the summer of 2006. Field sample analyses are in progress.
Selected Publications
In progress
Acknowledgements
This research is funded by a grant from the Joint Fire Science Program.