Bugged Forests

Bark beetles have been attacking trees and forests and now researchers have found that this is causing a problem to our climate. The bark beetles have been attacking the northern pines which have severely hurt the forests. When there is an outbreak of beetles in a forest the trees never fully recover from the damage that they have done to them. This in turn affects the carbon dioxide that they release into the air. This is posing as a bigger threat to the climate then researchers had originally thought. The beetles usually go for the forests with the pine trees and attack the older trees first. In a researchers report they found that it could take as few as seven years to have a full re-stocking of a stands carbon. The recovery process for the trees is very difficult, “But you can define recovery in several ways,” notes Pfeifer, now with the Forest Service in Challis, Idaho. For instance, “although the actual pool of carbon accumulated within that forest following the outbreak recovers, the rate at which it accumulates carbon never returns to what it had been before the outbreak,” he reports. Teams have been running tests to see how fast the trees recover from the attacks and they could take up to 7-25 years to get to the initial carbon state they were in. This is important to understand and learn because trees are a very important facto in our climate and how it is affected. If our trees are being affected by the beetles research needs to be done on how to stop it or how fast the trees can recover.

This topic is something that we all should be aware of. It is an issue that impacts us all and our way of living it at some risk. The beetles are such tiny creatures and they can make a huge dent in the way our climate is affected. It surprises me that this could even happen and it goes to show that even the smallest thing could affect our climate in a major way.

This relates to what we are learning in class in that we have learned how important the climate is and just how easily it can be affected. This in turn shows exactly that, beetles that are attacking trees can affect the climate it makes you wonder what else could be affecting our climate in such a major way.

source:http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/67781/title/Bugged_forests_bad_for_climate