Parks and province come together to fight pine beetle 

Parks Canada is taking an holistic approach to curbing the spread of the mountain pine beetle infestation. 

According to Dave Smith, fire and vegetation specialist for Parks Canada, the two keys that assist the pine beetle’s spread are global climate change, which has created warmer winters and increased the survivorship of the insect, as well as the fact that Jasper National Park has old forests ripe for the pine beetle’s picking.  

Parks sees the pest as a forest health issue.  “Forests aren’t supposed to be as old as they are,”  Smith said. “And now that they’re getting as old as they are, they’re getting sick and the symptom is the pine beetle.”  

The forests in the park are old due to effective fire suppression capabilities.  Unfortunately, trees that are 80-plus years old are the most susceptible to the mountain pine beetle, said Smith.   

Younger trees have more “vigour” said Smith.  They “have less tree and more pitch, or more sap running up and down the tree.  So what happens is, when a pine beetle drills a hole into the tree... there’s so much sap in there that it actually pitches the beetle out.  There’s so much pitch flowing out of that hole that it engulfs the beetle and pushes it out.”

That’s not to say that younger trees are not susceptible to pine beetle attacks.  It’s a matter of economies of scale, said Smith.  In the Prince George area for instance, there are so many beetles that they “are inundating even the younger trees...” he said.

Jasper is geographically gifted for pine beetle resistance. According to Smith, “our valleys are quite narrow and we have rock above, so it’s a lot easier for us to predict where the beetles are going to go. They’re going to follow the valleys.” Jasper loses about three to four hundred trees per year due to the pine beetle, which is quite low compared with areas losing hundreds of thousands of trees, added Smith.  

As far as the actual Parks’ plan is concerned, “we’re not trying to kill beetles by burning beetles,” said Smith, “that just doesn’t work.  What we’re trying to do is get ahead of the beetle and to put fire on the landscape to create a mosaic or to create, instead of seeing a carpet of fuel, to see a mosaic of different stand ages, so that when the beetles do fly, there’s a good potential that they’re going to land where basically there isn’t any habitat for them.”   

Due to varying weather conditions, the mountain pine beetles in the Jasper area have different maturation periods and life cycles, which benefits control initiatives.  Since “all the beetles are not maturing at the same time, flying at different times and things aren’t organized in their lives,” said Smith, in Jasper “...rather than having a whole bunch of trees with a whole bunch of beetles all in the same stage of development, we have beetle trees, but in different stages of development.”  

This lack of organization amongst the pine beetles may be a boon for Parks Canada. “Because our beetles are not well organized in they’re development, they might not be at the developmental stage they should be at this time of winter, which means they won’t have that... glycol, the antifreeze,” which keeps them alive during the chilly winter months.