Better management needed to combat beetle infestations, entomologist says
Approaches to forest management must change if B.C. wants to end bug outbreaks sooner, said the closing speaker at a two-day summit on managing the spread of spruce beetles.
“We need to keep the system in focus and remember the beetles are always there. They may not always kill trees but we need to act as if they’re going to very soon,” Staffan Lindgren, a retired University of Northern B.C. professor, told the group gathered Thursday at the Ramada in Prince George.
Management focuses too much on the agent – the beetle – when most focus should be on mimicking natural ecosystems and looking at what the beetle needs to survive.
“We should be managing a forest ecosystem not just the trees in the forest,” Lindgren said. “Unfortunately in forest health we’ve had kind of a boom and bust. We’ve just gone through the mountain pine beetle outbreak with tons of resources and money and research money and everything but what we need is a steadier approach to bark beetle management.”
Simplified stands create a better environment for the beetles to thrive and mulitiply.
“If you create the monoculture, they have a better situation and can do better,” he said.
“Stand structure can be incredibly important.”
The spruce beetle is especially difficult because trees don’t show signs of their presence until a year or even 18 months after the beetle has burrowed in.
“By the time you start recognizing that you have spruce beetle, they’re several generations into the outbreak,” he said.
Recent data for the Omineca region showed 210,000 hectares of forest damaged by the bug, up from 156,000 in October 2015.
The region contains nine million hectares of forest, with 4.7 million hectares available for logging.
Spruce represented about 22 per cent of the average annual timber harvested in B.C.’s Interior over the past five years.
Tim Ebata, a forest health officer with the ministry, said the goal of the summit was to share the best science for detection, the beetle’s biology and discuss what isn’t and isn’t working.
“We’ve learned a lot from the past but we’ve still got a lot of questions,” he said, adding the ministry is still working with licensees to decide how it will approach harvesting counts and it’s very important government work in collaboration with industry to manage the outbreak.
“(We’re) concerned about spruce beetle because of the timber supply shortage, particularly Prince George is facing,” said