Spruce Beetle Biology, Ecology and Management in the Rocky Mountains: An Addendum to Spruce Beetle in the Rockies

Abstract

Spruce beetle outbreaks have been reported in the Rocky Mountains of western North America since the late 1800s. In their classic paper, Spruce Beetle in the Rockies, Schmid and Frye reviewed the literature that emerged from the extensive outbreaks in Colorado in the 1940s. A new wave of outbreaks has affected Rocky Mountain subalpine spruce-fir forests beginning in the mid-1980s and continuing to the present. These outbreaks have spurred another surge of basic and applied research in the biology, ecology and management of spruce and spruce beetle populations. This paper is a review of literature on spruce beetle focusing on work published since the late 1970s and is intended as an addendum to Spruce Beetle in the Rockies.

Remote sensing of forest pest damage: a review and lessons learned from a Canadian perspective

“…By the following July, needles will usually fade to greenish yellow and fall shortly thereafter, while the bare red twigs that remain give the crown a reddish appearance (Safranyik 1995; Table 1). The four-week to six-week time window to detect the yellow-green colour of fading foliage is very narrow, and this will impact the availability of satellite images in a remote sensing application (Jenkins et al 2014). The optimal timing for detection is the summer following the attack (Table 1) that results in similar observations to those we made for mountain pine beetle.…”

Representing climate, disturbance, and vegetation interactions in landscape models

“…Abiotic disturbances that can be important to represent in LMs are wildland fire (Bowman et al, 2009;Marlon et al, 2009;Falk et al, 2011), severe wind events (e.g., windthrow, blowdown, foehn winds: Westerling et al, 2004;Busing et al, 2009), drought (McDowell et al, 2008;Allen et al, 2010;Anderegg et al, 2012), and severe weather (e.g., freeze-thaw, early spring frost) (Dale et al, 2001), but landslides, avalanches, and erosion may be important locally. Biotic disturbances of interest include insect outbreaks (ideally including both endemic and epidemic population phases) (Reynolds and Holsten, 1994;Carroll et al, 2003;Jenkins et al, 2014), disease (Garrett et al, 2006), grazing (Finch, 2011;Riggs et al, 2015). Human-caused disturbances (e.g., logging, mining, and fire exclusion) represent a major source of landscape impacts in most ecosystems and should be included if important to the region and relevant to the simulation objective (Bowman et al, 2011).…”

“…lightning) (Cary et al, 2006a,b;Gardner et al, 1997). In the case of insect outbreaks, initiation often progresses from the endemic phase as landscape composition interacts with past and present climate variability, to the epidemic stage where insect populations are active at coarse spatial scales and the degrees of effect make detection over landscape scales difficult (Raffa et al, 2008;Meigs et al, 2011;Jenkins et al, 2014). Similarly, the initiation of apparent drought effects on vegetation may lag quantitative climatic variables by several years, especially in species that have evolved tolerance to episodic drought .…”

Influence of selected factors on bark beetle outbreak dynamics in the Western Carpathians

“…as contributing factors (Desprez Lousteau et al 2006). Honey fungus is not only a problem of Europe; in North America (south-central Utah) an association of bark-beetle outbreaks with honey fungus (A. ostoyae) was detected (Jenkins et al 2014) on spruce trees (Picea engelmannii).…”