The 115-year bark beetle saga in the Black Hills
A ponderosa pine weeps pitch after a bark beetle attack
This research chronicles the science, people, and destruction caused by mountain pine beetles. These records primarily cover the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming from 1902 through 2012. A scoping General Technical Report (GTR) synthesizes a large portion of the information produced in the last 115 years on MPBs and provide context for informing, planning, and executing forest treatments to produce forests resilient to mountain pine beetle.
This work tells an intriguing story about bark beetles and the people who tried to understand and control them. In the Black Hills, 39 plots with a variety of tree densities were established for various studies. In 1985, mountain pine beetles began attacking some of the plots and major tree mortality commenced in several of them in 1987. Trees on most of the plots experienced extreme mountain pine beetle pressure and of these, the only ones to have surviving trees had densities less 80 square feet of basal area per acre.
The GTR covers other dimensions affected by bark beetles in the study area, including impacts to habitat for sensitive species like the northern goshawk, as well as the consequences for the decline in forest productivity for timber harvests.