- Mountain pine beetles that have devastated forests in BC have been found in the Northwest Territories for the first time. Live larvae of the beetle survived the winter in a small number of jack pine trees near the NWT border.
- The territorial forest ecologist expects the beetle population to remain small but the department will closely monitor the beetles and do further analysis to assess the risk to NWT forests.
- If the beetles continue surviving winters and spreading, the department may need to cut or burn infested trees to manage the pest, but it's too early to know if the beetles will become established in the NWT long-term.
Take the Bite Out of Summer. Enjoy less swatting and more of your yard this summer with Forest City Tree Protection\'s unique, environmentally-friendly Mosquito Control Program. All without unpleasant odors or disruption of daily activities
Take the Bite Out of Summer. Enjoy less swatting and more of your yard this summer with Forest City Tree Protection\'s unique, environmentally-friendly Mosquito Control Program. All without unpleasant odors or disruption of daily activities
CI 2.0 - Competitive Innovation IntelligenceArik Johnson
Presentation to KMWorld 2006 Audience in San Jose California October 31 on How the Principles of Disruptive Innovation, Risk Management, Corporate Governance and Enterprise Collaboration are Driving the Incorporation of Blog, Wiki, Social Networking, Free-Tagging, Prediction Market and other Web 2.0 Features and Capabilities into Traditional Competitive Intelligence Software
Clearwater 2Cover LetterProfessor Snape,I changed a few th.docxclarebernice
Clearwater 2
Cover Letter
Professor Snape,
I changed a few things around but kept a lot the same. As per your suggestion, I tried to clarify my thesis statement more and put more details in about what we can do to change around the habitats. I put more in about the cost of moving species to different habitats but there isn’t a whole lot of information yet about benefits, besides the moved species not dying out, because it’s only been done a few times.
I added a little bit more about polar bears because one of my peers said that he’d like more information about that and why it’s the face of the struggle. I had made an assumption that my target audience of people who have a basic knowledge of global warming and endangered species would know about the polar bear but I clarified it a bit more. My audience was the curious academic audience of my peers.
Sincerely,
Penelope Clearwater
Penelope Clearwater
Professor Snape
ENG 111-23N
17 November 2014
How Climatic Changes are Affecting Endangered Species
When you think of climate change endangering animals, the first thing that comes to mind is polar bears as they have become the face of this struggle. There are, however, plenty of other species that are affected just as much. “The major problem with climate change is not so much that climate is changing, but that it is changing faster than species can move or adapt” (Rout). I plan to look at which species are impacted that are closest to home, what we can do to help and how much this would cost. Setting up a separate habitat for species that might not have a habitat for much longer would be a good idea but should be worked out more since it comes at a cost and might not work out ecologically either.
Around the world there are endangered species are on the critical list such as the previously mentioned polar bears, tigers in India, the Sumatran orangutan and Mexico’s Santa Catalina Island rattlesnake and a few have become officially extinct like the Yangtze River dolphin. Global warming melting the polar ice caps endangers any animal relying on ice such as the polar bear which many people think of when they think of global warming endangering a species. It’s easy to be upset about these but hard to relate to however there are quite a few species in Indiana that are endangered. Georgia Parham of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Midwest Region tells us of a bat in Indiana that is having problems. Myotis sodalis, otherwise known as the Indiana bat, is in trouble because “they were struck four years ago by a deadly disease known as white-nose syndrome” (Parham). Climate change can stress these already stressed animals to the point where they die out. “Surface temperature is directly related to cave temperature, so climate change will inevitably affect the suitability of hibernacula” (Parham). Indiana bats require a certain temperature when hibernating so if it gets too hot or cold then there will be a rapid decline in their numbers. Since they have su ...
CI 2.0 - Competitive Innovation IntelligenceArik Johnson
Presentation to KMWorld 2006 Audience in San Jose California October 31 on How the Principles of Disruptive Innovation, Risk Management, Corporate Governance and Enterprise Collaboration are Driving the Incorporation of Blog, Wiki, Social Networking, Free-Tagging, Prediction Market and other Web 2.0 Features and Capabilities into Traditional Competitive Intelligence Software
Clearwater 2Cover LetterProfessor Snape,I changed a few th.docxclarebernice
Clearwater 2
Cover Letter
Professor Snape,
I changed a few things around but kept a lot the same. As per your suggestion, I tried to clarify my thesis statement more and put more details in about what we can do to change around the habitats. I put more in about the cost of moving species to different habitats but there isn’t a whole lot of information yet about benefits, besides the moved species not dying out, because it’s only been done a few times.
I added a little bit more about polar bears because one of my peers said that he’d like more information about that and why it’s the face of the struggle. I had made an assumption that my target audience of people who have a basic knowledge of global warming and endangered species would know about the polar bear but I clarified it a bit more. My audience was the curious academic audience of my peers.
Sincerely,
Penelope Clearwater
Penelope Clearwater
Professor Snape
ENG 111-23N
17 November 2014
How Climatic Changes are Affecting Endangered Species
When you think of climate change endangering animals, the first thing that comes to mind is polar bears as they have become the face of this struggle. There are, however, plenty of other species that are affected just as much. “The major problem with climate change is not so much that climate is changing, but that it is changing faster than species can move or adapt” (Rout). I plan to look at which species are impacted that are closest to home, what we can do to help and how much this would cost. Setting up a separate habitat for species that might not have a habitat for much longer would be a good idea but should be worked out more since it comes at a cost and might not work out ecologically either.
Around the world there are endangered species are on the critical list such as the previously mentioned polar bears, tigers in India, the Sumatran orangutan and Mexico’s Santa Catalina Island rattlesnake and a few have become officially extinct like the Yangtze River dolphin. Global warming melting the polar ice caps endangers any animal relying on ice such as the polar bear which many people think of when they think of global warming endangering a species. It’s easy to be upset about these but hard to relate to however there are quite a few species in Indiana that are endangered. Georgia Parham of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Midwest Region tells us of a bat in Indiana that is having problems. Myotis sodalis, otherwise known as the Indiana bat, is in trouble because “they were struck four years ago by a deadly disease known as white-nose syndrome” (Parham). Climate change can stress these already stressed animals to the point where they die out. “Surface temperature is directly related to cave temperature, so climate change will inevitably affect the suitability of hibernacula” (Parham). Indiana bats require a certain temperature when hibernating so if it gets too hot or cold then there will be a rapid decline in their numbers. Since they have su ...
Powepoint presentation that aided a presentation I did in November 2008 for DePauw University\'s Media Fellows and Science Research Fellows honors programs
Absent rings are rare in Northern Hemisphere forests outside the American Sou...Scott St. George
Background/Question/Methods
Under environmental stress, boreal and temperate trees will occasionally form a discontinuous layer of wood about their stem, a condition described as a locally-absent (or “missing”) growth ring. Absent rings can potentially cause errors in tree-ring dates and dendroclimatic reconstructions but the frequency, distribution and controls of these features are not well understood at large spatial scales. Furthermore, the recent claim that the Northern Hemisphere tree-ring network contains multiple chronological errors caused by widespread but unrecognized locally-absent rings has been difficult to evaluate because it is not known where or when absent rings have occurred across boreal and temperate forests or what environmental factors cause the development of spatially-extensive absent rings. Here we present a synthesis of locally-absent rings across the Northern Hemisphere during the last millennium based on 2,359 publicly-available tree ring-width records.
Results/Conclusions
Over the entire dataset, one locally-absent ring was observed for every 240 visible rings. More than half of all records (1,296 of 2,359) did not contain a single absent ring. Absent rings were extremely uncommon at high latitudes; poleward of 50°N, the absent:visible ratio increased from 1:240 to 1:2,500. Absent rings were not widespread during the growing seasons that followed the four largest stratospheric sulfate aerosol injection events of the last millennium, including A.D. 1259 and the “Year Without a Summer” in A.D. 1816 or during the coldest year in the Northern Hemisphere in the last 1,500 years. Because these features have occurred so rarely in high-latitude and high-elevation tree ring-width records, the argument that paleotemperature estimates based on these data contain chronological errors due to unrecognized absent rings is not consistent with field observations. If however the rate of absent-ring formation were to increase in forests outside of the American Southwest, that behavior would represent a response to environmental stress that is without precedent over the last millennium.
1. Environment Forests
15Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Annual General
Meeting
Thursday, April 18th
at 7:00 p.m.
Downstairs at the Legion
The Fort Smith
Golf Club
Annual General Meeting
Thursday, April 18th
at 7:00 p.m.
Downstairs at the Legion
The Fort Smith
Golf Club
Annual General Meeting
Live pine beetle larvae found in NWT
Pest that has devastated BC’s timber survives Northern winter
By RENÉE FRANCOEUR
Larvae of the devastating
mountain pine beetle that has
destroyed BC forests for the
past two decades survived the
winter in a handful of trees
in the Northwest Territories,
just north of the area where
the NWT, Alberta and BC
borders meet.
Environment and Natural
Resources (ENR) department
staff discovered the beetle in
a small cluster of NWT jack
pine trees last September, ter-
ritorial forest ecologist Mike
Gravel told The Journal.
There was doubt the pest
would survive the harsh
Northern winter, Gravel
noted, but the beetle, black
and typically as small as a
grain of rice, hasn’t given
up on the NWT yet.
“There was a very small
number of trees affected last
fall, less than a dozen I’d say,
in the area around the Kakisa
River that runs out of Al-
berta, north of the junction
of all three borders,” Gravel
said. “Alberta found them
(mountain pine beetles) in
2011 and were surprised at
how far north the species had
got, so last year we wanted to
monitor our forests and check
things out.”
It is not an infestation by
any means, he noted.
“There are about three to
four sites, with a few affected
treesineachsite,”Gravelsaid.
“The most we found on one
tree was, I believe, around 60
andnowforusthatmaysound
like a lot, but when we talk
to people from BC they tell
us to not even worry about
that because it’s so low com-
pared to what they’re seeing
on their trees.”
That being said, the de-
partment is keeping a close
eye on the beetle, especially
after the Alberta govern-
ment’s 2011-2012 mountain
pine beetle mortality survey
demonstrated high rates of
beetle survival in the Peace
River region. The report also
highlighted a larger number
of infested trees just south
of Grande Prairie, “posing a
high risk of beetle spread,”
and stated the probability
of additional spread deeper
into northwest Alberta from
nearby infested areas in BC
remains moderate to high.
According to a recent doc-
umentary, The Beetles are
Coming, the beetle, native
to BC, is expected to march
east across the country over
the next 20 years, wreaking
havoc on pines as far away as
the Maritimes.
“One of our objectives was
to see if the beetle had sur-
vived the winter, as our cold
weather is one of the reasons
insects like that have been
kept out of the North, and
so with the recent warming
they’ve managed to come
this far north, but we don’t
know if they will be able to
establish themselves long-
term,” Gravel said.
On Mar. 20, ENR forestry
officers returned to the af-
fected area to take puck sam-
ples (small discs) out of the
trees that include the bark
and inner rings where the
beetle larvae live.
Thepuckswerethenslowly
warmed to room temperature
at a Canadian Forest Service
laboratory in BC. Any living
larvae on the pucks will start
to reactivate and metabolize.
“There were a few larvae -
not very many - that did show
signs of life, so now we know
that the beetles can survive
in our Northern climate, at
least in the southern part of
the NWT and at least for this
one season,” Gravel said.
The battle isn’t anywhere
near over, however, Gravel
noted.
“There are still possibili-
ties. It was -20C in Fort Smith
recently, so a cold spring snap
could kill the beetles. Once
they start warming up in the
spring and they’re metabo-
lizing, they’re losing some of
theirinternalanti-freeze,ifyou
will,soeventhoughtherewere
live larvae a few weeks ago, a
cold spring could inflict more
damage on them, taking care
of them completely,” he said.
“We will continue to monitor
the beetles and will be head-
ing back to the site in a few
months.”
ENR starting full pest
risk analysis
Thenumberoneconcernfor
ENR now that the beetle has
made its way North of 60 and
survivedthewinterisensuring
theoverallhealthofNWTfor-
ests and wildlife, Gravel said.
The department is cur-
rently beginning a “full pest
risk analysis,” expected to
last throughout the summer,
to determine the scope of the
situation and what course of
action to take should beetle
numbers escalate.
Talks have started with
experts in BC, where an es-
timated 710 million cubic
metres of lodgepole pine
timber has been affected by
the bug since the outbreak
in the early 1990s.
“They were just recently
discovered here and they’re
not in any great number
that they are going to take
over our forest or anything
like that,” Gravel said. “We
have time to work with spe-
cialists in southern Canada
who have more experience
than us dealing with these
beetles and start collecting
more data.”
For example, ENR does
not have a complete and
accurate forest inventory
in the affected area, as it’s
“off the beaten track, not
close to any areas of harvest
or communities,” Gravel
said. It is also not known
how many pine trees are in
the NWT in total. This will
be one of the first things
done as part of the analy-
sis, Gravel said.
“If the pine trees are small,
young and sparse, there is re-
ally little risk of them being
impacted, but if we have
areas where there are large,
mature, over-mature pine
trees, those are ones we want
to focus on.”
Aerial surveys of other
areas that could be at risk
have already begun.
By fall, Gravel expects
to have a more clear idea of
the beetle problem and what
control mechanism, such as
cutting or burning, ENR will
use to manage the pest.
“Those beetles may have
just flown in this past sum-
mer under extreme warm
conditions with winds from
BC and Alberta and just hap-
pened to land there. Maybe
next summer, they’ll no lon-
ger be there. We’re at the be-
ginning stage of all these and
trying to determine if this
is just an isolated incident.”
Photo:NaturalResourcesCanada
Killing pine, the
beetle way
The beetle, about 4 to 7.5
mm in length, is only harm-
ful to pine trees and attacks
by laying its eggs under the
bark. Hatched larvae infil-
trate the phloem area be-
neath the bark, eventually
choking off the tree’s nutri-
ent supply. The beetles also
carry a blue stain fungi,
which further dehydrates
the tree.
NWT’s affected areas
are currently in the “green
attack” phase, Gravel said,
which means you cannot tell
by looking at them that they
have become infested.
By the end of summer,
they will slowly start to
turn red, which means
they have been hosting
the pest for about a year,
Gravel said.
After a couple years, all
the needles fall off the tree
and branches also begin to
drop off, he said.
Infested wood is still use-
able for firewood and qual-
ity products.
PhotocourtesyofMikeGravel
The mountain pine beetle is dark coloured and roughly the
size of a grain of rice, about 4 to 7.5 mm in length.
An adult beetle prepares to lay its eggs under the bark as it mines its way further up a
NWT pine tree.