a) Monocultures of trees originally grown in higher altitudes with high water demands make it easy for the bark beetles to thrive (esp. in this warming climate).
b) Additionally, these monocultures usually lack multiple levels of vegetation, allowing wind to pass through (it should go over) and further drying the land, harming the trees and creating a favorable environment for the beetles.
c) We've deforested the countryside so that only small forest areas remain, with large clearings, enabling the wind in again. Thanks to this the forests are losing their ability to hold water and produce new rains, worsening the drought conditions.
d) The removal of dead wood and litter further exacerbates the drying and destroys biodiversity, making the conditions even more suitable for the bark beetles to infest.
e) Furthermore, we tend to prioritize the felling of the strongest and biggest trees, with deep roots, weakening the overall resilience of the forest.
f) Instead of letting the trees mature with deep roots, we cut down the plantations when they're only 40 years old (youngsters).
g) The spruce and pine monocultures are the most susceptible to destruction by beetles, and when they're felled and sold as round wood abroad, the cycle continues with the replanting of the same type of forest.
I found this to be true of many "forests" in parks in Germany while living there. Felt absolutely bizarre.
The old airport in Munich got turned into a park, some parts are very cool, but there's this one area where they planted a bunch of trees...in an extremely precise grid structure. It's just so weird to see, like why would you do that? Like a stereotype of German culture brought to life.
It's the same here in British Columbia. Most people here have no idea that a vast bulk of our forests are in fact second or third generation since we began managing forests. They're not especially vibrant with life, and their diversity is remarkably low. If you live near it, it's virtually guaranteed that it's not a natural forest.
I own a small acreage in north GA, which is part of a former timber plantation. About 10 acres are nothing but densely packed southern pine monoculture. My neighbor has another 15 or so acres of pure pine adjacent to it, also rows and rows of the darned things.
Next to it I have another 20 or so of mixed hardwoods and pines. Hickory, oak etc. Native plants.
Nature is slowly but steadily reclaiming _almost_ everything - I see tons of whitetail, plenty of birds of prey, a family of black bears, the occasional flock of turkey, a very healthy population of various bugs, including ecologically sensitive dragonflies, butterflies, etc, and blissfully few wild hogs. There hasn’t been a week where I don’t see anything on the trail cam.
However… those 10 acres grow nothing, and I mean nothing, but southern pines. Unless I have it professionally managed (and hence, harvested), it will probably grow nothing but. I see the financial incentive, but it’s grim. I never spend any time there, whereas spending time in the mixed growth (still pine heavy!) is pleasant - hunting, camping, photography, riding ATVs, hiking (I have maybe a mile of trails, so maybe we’ll call it “walking” :-) ) - all feels natural. I’m not a professional, so maybe it’s not actually natural and healthy, but the amount of animals and plants I see and hear, it certainly feels like it is.
We don’t have bark bettle problems there, and whenever we do, the state and county would very happily help you to get rid of it - these things are the rural equivalent of a “national security” risk. The county foresters are a call away.
I’ve seen the devastation these beetles do in Germany just this year (vacation, but I also grew up there - saw it in the Harz and Sauerland), and it’s _incredible_.
I feel like our pine plantations have it coming if we (American timberland owners, that is) continue like this. But unfortunately, my 30something acres have nothing against the thousand of acres that actual, professional timber companies own. That’s billionaire territory.
The exact same pattern has covered enormous areas of Sweden, where industrial-scale timber production, often for nothing more than wood-chips, has replaced diverse old-woodland area.
The ancient forests have historically contained bark beetles - but crucially also their natural predators in the abundant biodiversity of their environment, including predatory insects and birds that feed on both the larva and the beetles.
The new monoculture plantations are arid deserts where bark beetles thrive without competition or natural checks. Not to speak of the tinder these dry and wind-swept forests provide, when fires start.
They are very profitable for their corporate owners though.
Mention should also be made of a restrained habitat for birds that could have eaten those bugs.
The large clearings could have worked in the existing forests’ advantage, if they would have been left alone (so to speak) and had wild grasses/plants been allowed to grow there.
As things stand right now most of the Western European “wild” habitat is manicured to hell and back, it feels like one is visiting a giant orangerie instead of nature itself. Things are a little better in that regard over here in Eastern Europe, but rapid societal development (lots more paved roads, people having money for vacation houses out in the “wilderness”, increased tourism) are putting all that in danger.
Its not really an issue, or only problem for humans. Bugs will kill the trees, consume the dead wood and fertilize the soil. Bio diversity will come back
No, the dead wood will get sold, the land will be cleared (they have special machinery now which destroys even large stumps that makes forest ground look like a crop field), burn or take away the dead wood and leave only the bare land.
Then they'll plant the same monoculture again.
It may be different in (some) reservations, but this is the common approach.
There are two bits of information that the article omits. Large chunks of the Harz forest are a nature reserve and only limited action will be taken, for example planting seedlings. Pesticides won’t be used in those zones - the only action that will be taken is a safety corridor around those zones. The spruce forests that grow there are not the original forest - they were planted to get access to cheap lumber for mining operations, sometimes on terrain unsuitable to spruce. Most of them were planted after WW2.
An interesting case study about this is the Bavarian Forest National Park.
In the 80s, several major storms caused a huge amount of trees to die, and there was a decision made to not intervene in the forest ecosystem and leave the dead trees instead of removing them.
Then in the 90s because of this and other reasons that created a favorable environment for the bark beetles, there was a massive spread of them and large parts of the forest died.
The national park management continued the policy of not intervening in the forest ecosystem, which was met by pretty heavy criticism from parts of the population.
However it seems to have worked out in the end, as the forest is now starting to regenerate.
It's interesting to note that these are not natural forests, but essentially man-made tree plantations, reforested since the 18th century after the natural forests had been eliminated in the centuries before mainly because of ore mining. Same story further to the south-east in the Ore Mountains.
Getting rid of the spruce tree mono culture and letting a mixed forest regrow will be a good thing even if it will take a century or more (that's at least what the strategy seems to be in Ore Mountains).
The Swiss National Park was mostly untouched since 1914: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_National_Park However, that probably does not qualify as old growth. The list you linked to does not list any forest in Switzerland.
Apparently parts of Ruegen island are "old forest" and some patches here in there in nature reserves, but I guess one could argue that even the old Slavic and Germanic tribes already "cultivated" their forests.
I recently visited Harz and subsequently Saxon Switzerland (which is in Germany and Czechia, not Switzerland) and both had issues with these beetles. I was just a tourist, so I'd love to hear a local chime in for any corrections.
I was initially shocked that a country could log their own national parks, but eventually came to understand the situation. They log to avoid the beetles spreading, but also because the trees the beetles have infested become risks of starting fires. A fire had occurred on the Czech side of Saxon not too long before I visited.
Harz looks specifically bad until you get near the summit (Brocken) because they've explicitly decided to naturally re-forest the park. This reforestation policy isn't new though; it's been applied since miners over-extracted the mountain and destroyed much of the park around the dig-sites, the park brought in new species, and then ultimately decided those new species weren't going to restore their old habitat.
Yes it's definitely noticeable in my home region (Ore Mountains near the Czech border). Not as large scale as in the photos of that article, more like isolated spots. The forst is definitely getting thinner, at first caused by the massive damage from storms like Kyrill, and then the dry summers in recent years.
Same long-term strategy as in the Harz mountains though: natural reforestation, which should eventually lead to a more robust forest (maybe at the cost of profitability).
They're also a big problem here in New Mexico. I live on a heavily wooded lot of mixed pinyon and juniper. About half of my pinyon have died, and I've spent much of my free time in the last two years removing them. But the surrounding lots and the adjacent vast public lands have scary amounts of dead fuel on the ground. I'm preparing for a major fire as if it's inevitable and imminent, rather than just another risk. My previous home insurance company doubled my rates so I moved to another ... which my agent tells me, has already withdrawn insurance underwriting from much of the area.
The pinyon that are left tend to be the ones that grow closely with the juniper, which is somehow protective. Removing dead trees seems to slow down the disease in nearby trees, so it acts like a spreading infection. I'm told that the bark beetles are usually controlled by die-offs in winter cold snaps, and we just haven't had the necessary cold snaps in recent winters.
> But the tiny insects have been causing outsized devastation to the forests in recent years, with officials grappling to get the pests under control before the spruce population is entirely decimated. Two-thirds of the spruce in the region have already been destroyed, said Alexander Ahrenhold from the Lower Saxony state forestry office, and as human-caused climate change makes the region drier and the trees more favorable homes for the beetles’ larvae, forest conservationists are preparing for the worst.
It seems this is not exactly new:
> Around 1800, large swathes of the Harz were deforested. The less resistant spruce monoculture, that arose as a consequence of the mining industry in the Upper Harz, was largely destroyed by a bark beetle outbreak and a storm of hurricane proportions in November 1800. This largest known bark beetle infestation in the Harz was known as the Große Wurmtrocknis, and destroyed about 30,000 hectares (74,000 acres) of spruce forest and lasted about for 20 years. The woods were largely reforested with spruce. Continuous problems with bark beetle and storms were the negative side effects of mining in the Harz Mountains.
> In the longer term, mixing other tree species into the forest could be a solution, Ahrenhold said. “It makes sense to plant other conifers that can cope better with these conditions, especially on south-facing slopes and on very dry soil,” he said.
The AP article fails to mention the massive amount of deforestation and animal depopulation that's occurred for centuries now, but which is well-documented in the Wikipedia article. This gives the misleading impression that what's happening now is somehow unprecedented.
The issue, it seems, is that trying to "manage" the land doesn't work. It may even be more the root of the problem than the solution.
These were some of the most common trees around until this damn bugs got here. The emerald ash borer (EAB) (Agrilus planipennis) is an invasive beetle from Asia that infests and kills North American ash species (Fraxinus sp.) including green, white, black and blue ash. All of New York's native ash trees are susceptible to EAB.
Same thing happened where I'm from, Illinois, a decade ago or so. They were basically all wiped out.
However the past few times I've visited I've actually noticed both young ash trees and old "dead" trees that had been cut down to the stump with new growth.
It makes me wonder if there'll be new a balance struck where there will be ash trees, and there will be ash borer, just fewer of each.
They're also rampant around the SF bay area; they mostly leave the native trees alone, but I'm staring at a massive dead pine tree that was healthy a few years ago.
The damage in the article looks different though. Our beetles seem to focus on a ring of bark near the ground, so they don't have to eat nearly as much to kill the tree.
I remember that when I was in school good parts of the Harz mountains were destroyed by the Bark Beetle, but at that time it was acid rain that made matters worse. It was a poster example of the Waldsterben (dying of forests) at that time. This phenomenon has been politically abused at least since the 80s.
The classic 1980's "Waldsterben" meme photo was a strip of dead forest along the Czech border near the Fichtelberg though, this was most likely caused by dirty coal power station emissions from across the border, at times the air would reek of cat piss which we used to call "Bohemian Air".. or maybe better translated as "Bohemian Wind" :)
That acid rain certainly had an effect in some regions, but people at that time were very fast to attribute every single dying tree to that cause, just like today they do it with climate change. However, Bark Beetles don't need any helpers like acid rain or climate change, they can destroy a forest perfectly by themselves if they are in the right mood.
Readit News
a) Monocultures of trees originally grown in higher altitudes with high water demands make it easy for the bark beetles to thrive (esp. in this warming climate).
b) Additionally, these monocultures usually lack multiple levels of vegetation, allowing wind to pass through (it should go over) and further drying the land, harming the trees and creating a favorable environment for the beetles.
c) We've deforested the countryside so that only small forest areas remain, with large clearings, enabling the wind in again. Thanks to this the forests are losing their ability to hold water and produce new rains, worsening the drought conditions.
d) The removal of dead wood and litter further exacerbates the drying and destroys biodiversity, making the conditions even more suitable for the bark beetles to infest.
e) Furthermore, we tend to prioritize the felling of the strongest and biggest trees, with deep roots, weakening the overall resilience of the forest.
f) Instead of letting the trees mature with deep roots, we cut down the plantations when they're only 40 years old (youngsters).
g) The spruce and pine monocultures are the most susceptible to destruction by beetles, and when they're felled and sold as round wood abroad, the cycle continues with the replanting of the same type of forest.
I went there to find nothing else than a pine plantation. No a single bird or any other animal for that matter there - it's essentially a tall lawn.
The old airport in Munich got turned into a park, some parts are very cool, but there's this one area where they planted a bunch of trees...in an extremely precise grid structure. It's just so weird to see, like why would you do that? Like a stereotype of German culture brought to life.
One example at the park: https://maps.app.goo.gl/4G2Wg2BHgfiZkaxe7
Though you can see some other areas where they did the same thing.
The amount of truly old, "ancient" (250 or 400 years +, depending on stand-replacing disturbance) forest in our vast province is minuscule: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/farming-natural-resources-...
Next to it I have another 20 or so of mixed hardwoods and pines. Hickory, oak etc. Native plants.
Nature is slowly but steadily reclaiming _almost_ everything - I see tons of whitetail, plenty of birds of prey, a family of black bears, the occasional flock of turkey, a very healthy population of various bugs, including ecologically sensitive dragonflies, butterflies, etc, and blissfully few wild hogs. There hasn’t been a week where I don’t see anything on the trail cam.
However… those 10 acres grow nothing, and I mean nothing, but southern pines. Unless I have it professionally managed (and hence, harvested), it will probably grow nothing but. I see the financial incentive, but it’s grim. I never spend any time there, whereas spending time in the mixed growth (still pine heavy!) is pleasant - hunting, camping, photography, riding ATVs, hiking (I have maybe a mile of trails, so maybe we’ll call it “walking” :-) ) - all feels natural. I’m not a professional, so maybe it’s not actually natural and healthy, but the amount of animals and plants I see and hear, it certainly feels like it is.
We don’t have bark bettle problems there, and whenever we do, the state and county would very happily help you to get rid of it - these things are the rural equivalent of a “national security” risk. The county foresters are a call away.
I’ve seen the devastation these beetles do in Germany just this year (vacation, but I also grew up there - saw it in the Harz and Sauerland), and it’s _incredible_.
I feel like our pine plantations have it coming if we (American timberland owners, that is) continue like this. But unfortunately, my 30something acres have nothing against the thousand of acres that actual, professional timber companies own. That’s billionaire territory.
The ancient forests have historically contained bark beetles - but crucially also their natural predators in the abundant biodiversity of their environment, including predatory insects and birds that feed on both the larva and the beetles.
The new monoculture plantations are arid deserts where bark beetles thrive without competition or natural checks. Not to speak of the tinder these dry and wind-swept forests provide, when fires start.
They are very profitable for their corporate owners though.
The large clearings could have worked in the existing forests’ advantage, if they would have been left alone (so to speak) and had wild grasses/plants been allowed to grow there.
As things stand right now most of the Western European “wild” habitat is manicured to hell and back, it feels like one is visiting a giant orangerie instead of nature itself. Things are a little better in that regard over here in Eastern Europe, but rapid societal development (lots more paved roads, people having money for vacation houses out in the “wilderness”, increased tourism) are putting all that in danger.
Deleted Comment
Then they'll plant the same monoculture again.
It may be different in (some) reservations, but this is the common approach.
Here‘s an article that goes into a little more detail (in german, from the nature park administration) https://www.nationalpark-harz.de/de/der-nationalpark-harz/wa...
Then in the 90s because of this and other reasons that created a favorable environment for the bark beetles, there was a massive spread of them and large parts of the forest died. The national park management continued the policy of not intervening in the forest ecosystem, which was met by pretty heavy criticism from parts of the population.
However it seems to have worked out in the end, as the forest is now starting to regenerate.
There is a decent summary on the German Wikipedia page here: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalpark_Bayerischer_Wald#...
Deleted Comment
Getting rid of the spruce tree mono culture and letting a mixed forest regrow will be a good thing even if it will take a century or more (that's at least what the strategy seems to be in Ore Mountains).
This lists a few without much detail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_old-growth_forests
I was initially shocked that a country could log their own national parks, but eventually came to understand the situation. They log to avoid the beetles spreading, but also because the trees the beetles have infested become risks of starting fires. A fire had occurred on the Czech side of Saxon not too long before I visited.
Harz looks specifically bad until you get near the summit (Brocken) because they've explicitly decided to naturally re-forest the park. This reforestation policy isn't new though; it's been applied since miners over-extracted the mountain and destroyed much of the park around the dig-sites, the park brought in new species, and then ultimately decided those new species weren't going to restore their old habitat.
Same long-term strategy as in the Harz mountains though: natural reforestation, which should eventually lead to a more robust forest (maybe at the cost of profitability).
The pinyon that are left tend to be the ones that grow closely with the juniper, which is somehow protective. Removing dead trees seems to slow down the disease in nearby trees, so it acts like a spreading infection. I'm told that the bark beetles are usually controlled by die-offs in winter cold snaps, and we just haven't had the necessary cold snaps in recent winters.
It seems this is not exactly new:
> Around 1800, large swathes of the Harz were deforested. The less resistant spruce monoculture, that arose as a consequence of the mining industry in the Upper Harz, was largely destroyed by a bark beetle outbreak and a storm of hurricane proportions in November 1800. This largest known bark beetle infestation in the Harz was known as the Große Wurmtrocknis, and destroyed about 30,000 hectares (74,000 acres) of spruce forest and lasted about for 20 years. The woods were largely reforested with spruce. Continuous problems with bark beetle and storms were the negative side effects of mining in the Harz Mountains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harz
> In the longer term, mixing other tree species into the forest could be a solution, Ahrenhold said. “It makes sense to plant other conifers that can cope better with these conditions, especially on south-facing slopes and on very dry soil,” he said.
The AP article fails to mention the massive amount of deforestation and animal depopulation that's occurred for centuries now, but which is well-documented in the Wikipedia article. This gives the misleading impression that what's happening now is somehow unprecedented.
The issue, it seems, is that trying to "manage" the land doesn't work. It may even be more the root of the problem than the solution.
Money, as always.
https://www.dec.ny.gov/animals/7253.html
These were some of the most common trees around until this damn bugs got here. The emerald ash borer (EAB) (Agrilus planipennis) is an invasive beetle from Asia that infests and kills North American ash species (Fraxinus sp.) including green, white, black and blue ash. All of New York's native ash trees are susceptible to EAB.
However the past few times I've visited I've actually noticed both young ash trees and old "dead" trees that had been cut down to the stump with new growth.
It makes me wonder if there'll be new a balance struck where there will be ash trees, and there will be ash borer, just fewer of each.
The damage in the article looks different though. Our beetles seem to focus on a ring of bark near the ground, so they don't have to eat nearly as much to kill the tree.