The mountain pine beetle has been able to spread its range from B.C. The first are pests and disease ravaging the already-stressed trees, which are now more susceptible to attack. With dry conditions and standing dead trees, there are two imminent threats that arise. “Although that’s a concern for the longer term.” Overall, it is mostly a slow degradation and deforestation isn’t widespread, yet. And it tends to be in the more drought-affected areas,” Hogg said. “We have some examples of that, but it’s generally over smaller areas. Where trees once stood, there is now Prairie grasslands. In the most extreme cases, tree stands that used to house birds and forest animals are flat out disappearing with mortality rates nearing 100 per cent. Trees are adaptable, but only within certain limits, and right now they’re dying at a consistent rate two to nearly four-times what was seen before 2000.Ībout four to five per cent of the Aspen Hogg studies as an example species is dying each year. “With these repeated droughts, that’s where we’re really seeing an escalation of tree mortality.” “The rate of tree death will increase for up to 10 years after even one severe drought,” Hogg said. Repeated droughts have pretty well made dry conditions the new norm since the turn of the millenia. Water, or lack thereof, is the biggest factor in the forest’s slow death, Hogg said. The behemoth covers more than half of the country’s land mass, a swath that stretches from Yukon to Newfoundland and Labrador. “This seems to be a pattern throughout our urban forest here in Edmonton, but it’s also something that’s been happening over a larger area of Western Canada.”Įdmonton sits at the southern edge of the boreal forest 一 the largest forest in Canada. Hogg is a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, a subsector of Natural Resources Canada. And then there’s spruce ahead of us that’ve died a few years ago,” he said. There’s dead poplar, you can see the dead tops up there. Pointing to several of the snow bearing trees, he indicates the deaths he’s already witnessing from climate change. Ted Hogg’s research usually takes him much deeper in Canada’s boreal forest - but on a chilly day strolling through Edmonton’s river valley, it doesn’t take long before he sees examples of the damage he’s looking for.
0 kommentar(er)
