Anyone on the American West Coast knows the extent of the drought which is now entering its fifth year. Those who live in the forested regions on the West Coast, and especially in northern and central California, understand the results of five years of drought.
Tree mortality could be described as a pandemic in both of Northern and Central California. The most affected tree in Central California is the Ponderosa Pine, and the Stanislaus Forest is at risk of losing nearly most, if not nearly all of, the Ponderosa Pines which fill the region.
Ponderosa Pines are the predominant species of evergreen tree in much of the Stanislaus Forest and are under attack, as always, by Bark Beetle infestations. The difference this year is the lack of snowfall for the past five winters and the subsequent lack of moisture available to allow the conifers to fight off the Bark Beetle intrusion.
Typically, most of the Bark Beetles would be fought off by each individual tree when the tree is bored by the beetle to lay its eggs by oozing sap out of the hole and encasing the beetle in the sap, or at least the eggs which are laid in the hole.
When the trees are short on water though, they aren’t able to produce enough sap to fight off all the beetles attacking them. That is now the case in a swath of forest to such a degree that there are now more than twenty nine million dead trees in the California forests.
Twenty-nine million trees are dead in the forest now, that number is growing daily in a manner that it has now reached a degree of concern at the State Government level, with a Tree Mortality Task Force having been encouraged by Governor Brown issuing a Proclamation of a State of Emergency. The task force is comprised of Cal Fire, the Office of the Governor, and the California Office of Emergency Services
The management objectives of the task force issuing the response are simple to jot down on paper, and don’t take up much space or even much time to read.
Management Objectives:
Provide for public health and safety of persons and property in identified high hazard zones
Ensure efforts associated with implementation of the directives contained in the
Governor’s State of Emergency Proclamation remain coordinated
Ensure continuous communication among state, federal, tribal and local governments, as well as with other non-governmental organizations assigned to the task force
Provide consistent and coordinated messaging between task force member agencies and the public
Manage projects and programs in a financially responsible and efficient manner
Implementation of those objectives is going to be far more difficult and expensive. Eventually it will likely also require rethinking how our forests are managed, even in non-drought cycles.
The video included in this article runs a bit more than three minutes and was produced by the California State Association of Counties (CSAC). The video shows the extent to which portions of California’s forests have been ravaged by the drought induced Bark Beetle infestation and the degree of danger which will be caused should a wild-land fire get started in the midst of so many dead trees.
As reported at MML, there have been fire drills occurring in the Central California area already. Preparations are being made by every agency in California to manage any fires which do get started and to reduce the likelihood of any of those fires reaching the epic proportions as seen recently in Canada in conjunction with the Fort McMurray Fire and the 2013 Rim Fire which was the second largest fire recorded in California history, both being well reported here at Digital Journal.
Worth noting is the environmental damage being caused by the tree mortality and any massive wild-land fires resulting from such an over-abundance of fuels in the forest. Water sheds, and wildlife habitat will suffer the greatest harm, as well as the communities which are now deeply embedded within areas having tree mortality rates as high as fifty percent of the trees. Also worth noting is the size of the trees involved in the mortality incidents, the trees in question aren’t only the younger and smaller, less deeply rooted Ponderosa Pine, Sugar Pine and Cedars. Trees with a circumference measurement of 24 inches up to 36 inches are as heavily involved in the disaster as any of the younger trees.
The difficulty of removing many of those large dead trees is made more difficult when they are tucked in between power lines and heavily traveled roadways, in business districts and residential areas. Several agencies in Tuolumne County have put together a plan to deal with the dead tree problem along with Pacific Gas & Electric Company and the local utility district.
The Stanislaus National Forest has even issued guidelines on where not to camp, along with popular camp site closures due to proliferation of dead trees in some of the camp site areas. Best to call ahead and check on availability. Cal Fire has produced a state wide Tree Mortality Viewer which shows the extent of the problem. This DJ report being in Tuolumne County has an appreciation for the problem, living in the area offers that first -hand experience which is not reproducible in any form.
The extent of the tree die-off in Madera, Fresno, and Tulare counties boggles the mind when looking at the Tree Mortality Viewer results and extrapolating from the degree of devastation seen locally. When the term unimaginable is used, it means precisely that in this case. It is simply unfathomable to expect the average adult, even those aware of what it might look like, to imagine what the areas in those three counties must look like.
