News & Photo’s

—motherjones.com—

Whitebark Pine nears a possible wipeout as a species.

—WyoFile.com—

For millennia, whitebark pine trees have held firm to the cold, rocky timberlines of the northern Rockies, Cascades and Sierra Nevada, providing shelter, food and other ecosystem services for mountain wildlife.
But before long, the hardy, snow-battered tree whose nutritionally dense seeds are a delicacy for grizzly bears, red squirrels and mountain birds may become functionally extinct.
In numerous reaches of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and southern Canada, whitebark pine trees have declined by as much as 90 percent, experts say, and their prospects for recovery seem to be growing dimmer by the year.
“It’s going and it’s going fast,” said Bob Keane, a research ecologist with the Forest Service’s Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory in Montana. “It’s working itself from the north to the south to Yellowstone.”

SSSS

Pine Beetle Epidemic From Canada to Mexico

—NPS.com—

About Shoshone National Forest

—www.fs.usda.gov—

White-bark pine ravaged throughout Yellowstone

—LA Times July 2010—

A SIMILAR AMOUNT OF FOREST IS AT RISK IN IDAHO, MONTANA AND WYOMING

Study: Beetle’s pine toll reaches 1M acres

— billingsgazette.com—Whitebark pine nuts are an important, high-calorie food for grizzly bears, a federally protected threatened species. Whitebark forests also keep high-elevation snowfall from blowing or melting away before spring runoff provides critical water for cities and agriculture.

The researchers mapped the photographs and classified the proportion of dead and dying trees on a 1-6 scale. Forty-six percent of the whitebark forest surveyed scored 3 or higher, with beetle kill ranging from widespread to practically every tree….In 1988, wildfires burned 1.2 million acres in and near Yellowstone National Park. The whitebark devastation hasn’t drawn nearly as much attention, partly because most whitebark in the region grow above 8,500 feet — for the most part out of sight from paved roads.

Yet the whitebark devastation could last much longer than the Yellowstone fires. The trees take much longer to regenerate than the lower-elevation species that burned, said Logan.

“It’s a really different ecological situation in whitebark,” he said.