Pine Beetle Wars

The Black Hills of South Dakota, the Black Elk Wilderness in particular, is just one of any number of areas in the western US that has a significant pine beetle infestation. The issue of how to manage damage from beetle kill is no small task, especially when federally designated wilderness is brought into the discussion. Land managers across the western US are wrestling with the pine beetle and what do about it, in addition to other threats to wilderness.

The mountain pine beetle (MPB), Dendroctonus ponderosae, is a species of bark beetle native to the forests of western North America from Mexico to central British Columbia. It has a hard black exoskeleton and measures about 5 millimeters, about the size of a grain of rice. Mountain pine beetles inhabit ponderosa, lodgepole, Scotch and limber pine trees. During early stages of an outbreak, attacks are limited largely to trees under stress from injury, poor site conditions, fire damage, overcrowding, root disease, or old age. As beetle populations increase, the beetles attack the largest trees in the outbreak area.

A recent article in the South Dakota Rapid City Journal explores the issues surrounding the pine beetle both inside and outside of wilderness.

From the Rapid City Journal:

The fight is over in the Black Elk Wilderness. The beetles won.

And they’re winning all through the Norbeck Wildlife Preserve, a 35,000-acre tract of relative isolation that includes the 13,000-acre Black Elk and the state’s highest point at Harney Peak.

That ravaged piece of high-country landscape is the epicenter of a plague of mountain pine beetles that is eating its way across the Black Hills. It is a biological version of a wildfire that could for generations change the face of this island of forest rising up from the surrounding plains.

The patches of rusty-brown pine trees that mark the destructive path of the beetles are appearing everywhere. Once limited to a few patches of dead or dying trees in the high country, they are now apparent from the highway near Crazy Horse, along the road to Rochford and on the ridges of Spearfish Mountain.

“Just about anywhere you go in the forest these days you can throw a rock and hit a beetle tree sooner or later,” said Kurt Allen, an entomologist for the U.S. Forest Service in Rapid City. “In my travels around the Hills, I’ve seen it just about everywhere.”

Read the full article here: http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/news/article_aeb883cc-0034-11e0-a6a5-001cc4c03286.html