Half of Jasper’s pine forest infected by mountain beetle

‘We don’t have any doubt that this forest will regenerate,’ says park spokesman

EDMONTON The iconic pine trees blanketing Jasper National Park may never be the same as a mountain pine beetle epidemic has infected nearly half of the park’s pine forest.

The area affected in the 11,000-square-kilometre park is approximately doubling each year, said Dave Argument, resource conservation manager with Jasper National Park, in a Monday interview. Sections of the forest have turned bright red as larvae feed on phloem in the tree trunks and kill them.

About 93,000 hectares of the park’s 200,000-hectare pine forests were affected in the federal agency’s most recent survey last winter, he said.

“We don’t have any doubt that this forest will regenerate. It will just be a different forest for the foreseeable future,” Argument said.

As an epidemic of pine beetles move in from British Columbia, their survival in higher eleva- tions around Jasper is enabled by warmer winters resulting from climate change, reads the Parks Canada website.

A past practice of extinguishing wildfires in the park has allowed the forest to become denser and older, accelerating the beetle’s spread, Argument said. Researchers now believe forest fires should be allowed to burn — except where lives or property are threatened.

The pine beetle infestation has moved beyond the national park’s eastern borders into forests near Hinton, Edson, northern Alberta, and the Lac La Biche area. The beetle had never been seen in these areas before 2006, said Caroline Whitehouse, a forest health specialist with Alberta Agriculture and Forestry. The spread could affect 14 logging companies that harvest pine in Alberta.

ELEVATED FIRE RISK

In Jasper, tourists and residents will see more of the forests turn red, then grey, as trees die, Argument said.

The risk of a hotter, faster, more dangerous forest fire is higher when those dead trees remain standing with dry needles attached, said Greg Van Tighem, fire chief for the Town of Jasper.

He’s watched as red trees appeared west of town, marching east of Jasper during the last yearand-a-half, then spreading south down the Icefields Parkway “It’s catastrophic. It’s terrible. But, it’s Mother Nature, too,” he said.

After seeing the destructive 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, Van Tighem escalated Jasper’s preparations for a major forest fire.

The fire department bought a new truck that can spray water while moving, and five smaller water tanks that can sit in the back of a pickup truck. In the last two years, the mostly-volunteer fire department recruited more firefighters, ramped up training, revamped emergency and evacuation plans, and hammered out firefighting agreements with nearby municipalities.

Both Parks Canada and the town have plans this upcoming winter to cut down and burn several hundred hectares of pine trees to keep potential wildfires away from buildings and people.

“I don’t want anybody to panic,” Van Tighem said. “In reality, we’re very safe.”

THE FUTURE

The provincial government, meanwhile, is trying to prevent the spread of the pest across Alberta. Aerial and ground surveys have shown about 2.3 million hectares of forest are affected by mountain pine beetle, with another six million hectares of pine susceptible to infection, Alberta Forestry’s Whitehouse said.

The government felled and burned 91,000 infected pine trees last winter, she said — nearly twothirds of them in the Hinton and Edson areas. The number of infected trees cut down is increasing yearly. The government is also directing forestry companies to log trees of different ages as a longerterm prevention strategy, she said.

Although Parks Canada usually lets nature take its course, it began controlled burns and tree removal in 2016 in Jasper to reduce fire risk and prevent beetle spread to provincial land.

Some pine trees in the national park will dodge the beetle, but visitors can expect to see more dead trees, and eventually, more growth of bushes, ferns, and wildflowers, Argument said.

Pine forests in B.C. and Waterton National Park previously destroyed by pine beetles did regenerate over time.