Frisco – Pine beetles that have killed millions of trees across Colorado and the West have not substantially raised wildfire hazards, a researcher said Wednesday.
Instead, big forest fires are more likely to break out during droughts, when the same warm, dry conditions that turn trees kiln-dry coincidentally promote beetle outbreaks.
“There is a risk of fire, but that risk was here prior to the outbreak of pine beetles,” said Dominik Kulakowski, a professor of geography and biology at Clark University in Massachusetts, on a media tour of beetle-devastated areas in Summit County.
While dead trees burn easily, even green ones are susceptible to raging wildfires in dry times, said Kulakowski, who has studied the naturally occurring cycles of beetle outbreaks in Colorado for nine years.
“So the question is, are forest-fire conditions high? Yes. Is that risk because of the pine-beetle outbreak? No. It’s related to climatic conditions,” he said.
The beetles, which bore into the bark to lay their eggs, are part of the natural landscape that help regenerate forests.
Unless there is an extended spell of extremely cold, larvae-killing weather, the outbreak appears likely to slow only when they have eaten through the supply of aged trees.
Logging dead trees in reaction to the current beetle outbreak – which has decimated an estimated 660,000 acres of Colorado pine forests – shouldn’t be confused with efforts to reduce wildfire hazards, Kulakowski said.
“We’re sort of barking up the wrong tree if we’re trying to mitigate the fire risk by dealing with the bark-beetle outbreak,” he said.
Property owners and communities should carve out “defensible spaces” to protect development from forest fires, said Barry Smith, the emergency- management director for Eagle County, but culling dead trees deeper in the forests is not ecologically necessary.
“There is a little bit of increased fire danger when we have these trees with the red needles on them,” he said.
“They’ll ignite similar to gasoline. But in a year or two, when the needles drop off and we have the ghost trees, we call them – the gray trees – the fire danger will diminish,” Smith said.
The tour was sponsored by the Southern Rockies Conservation Alliance, a consortium of some 25 environmental groups. The alliance organizers said they are not opposed to logging in all cases.
“The temptation is to want to do something,” said Sloan Shoemaker, director of the Wilderness Workshop, a conservation organization in the Roaring Fork Valley. “The question is where the doing occurs, and what the doing is doing.”
Staff writer Steve Lipsher can be reached at 970-513-9495 or slipsher@denverpost.com.
