http://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/02/03/climate-change-forestry
Minnesota is unique because it lies at the convergence of three distinct ecosystems, or biomes. And the boundaries among those three - boreal forests of spruce, fir, pine and birch; deciduous forests of maple and oak and basswood; and prairie grasslands - are very sensitive to climate changes, said Lee Frelich, the director of the University of Minnesota Center for Forest Ecology.
In addition, Minnesota has been warming faster than most other states. In particular, northern Minnesota is heating up faster still - by nearly three degrees over the past century.
...
Minnesota's iconic northern forests are undergoing a gradual shift as the climate warms. Aspen, birch, balsam fir and black spruce, for example, are projected largely to vanish from the state by the end of the century.
But some foresters are suggesting a more radical shift in approaching what to do about it. Although not everyone agrees, some in forestry are stressing urgency and experimenting with bringing new species from hundreds of miles away, betting that with a helping hand those trees stand a better chance of producing a healthy diverse forest than existing species.
For proponents, bringing oaks and even ponderosa pines from as far away as the Black Hills is the best way to ensure Minnesota and its sizable forest industry will have thriving forests many decades from now. Others worry that the idea is too much of a gamble and could wind up essentially introducing troublesome invasive species.
...
DNR [Department of Natural Resources] forest ecologist John Almendinger said, "I'm not wild about the idea of using our native forests as the place to experiment. I don't like the concept right now of moving trees that have shown no ability to perform in those kinds of habitats."
Palik at the Forest Service said planning for the uncertainty of how rainfall and temperature might change is the challenge. But he believes forest managers need to be more urgent and have little time to pause.
"I've had the realization that we are faced with something potentially very radical and unprecedented, in terms of the future climate scenario and habitat suitabillty for species we have here," Palik said. "The time to be thinking about how to act is now, and the time to act even beyond experimentation is rapidly approaching."
While climate change may not be easily evident in your corner of the world, there's no ignoring it in the Northland. From longer growing seasons, shorter snow seasons, warmer winters, and less lake ice, it's hard to ignore. It's increasingly evident that adaptation, not prevention, is the task at hand. For more information on the signs of Minnesota's changing climate, check out another MPR article with all the stats.
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Wednesday February 04 2015, @09:35PM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_pine_beetle [wikipedia.org]
That will make most of pine extinct, so should simplify things a little.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04 2015, @09:50PM
i live in the southeast. pine trees are everywhere. have heard about pine beetles all my life...still pine trees everywhere. it was my understanding that the beetles really don't damage the pines here much unless the tree was already weakened by other disease or weather (tornadoes, high-winds, lightning strikes) the biggest threat to trees where i live are humans building homes and malls.
(Score: 4, Informative) by fadrian on Wednesday February 04 2015, @10:00PM
the biggest threat to trees where i live are humans building homes and malls.
Woo hoo!!! Apex predator FTW!
That is all.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday February 04 2015, @10:39PM
i live in the southeast. pine trees are everywhere. have heard about pine beetles all my life...still pine trees everywhere.
Pine Beetles don't live in the Southeast.
reference [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by ah.clem on Wednesday February 04 2015, @11:36PM
Au contraire - I have over 100 pines on my property and I back to a state forest that has been devastated by pine beetles; I am afraid I will lose my lovely trees one day soon. Please don't always trust Wikipedia - please see this article http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/trees/southern_pine_beetle.htm [ufl.edu]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by LancePodstrong on Thursday February 05 2015, @02:39AM
Southern Pine Beetles [wikipedia.org] do.
(Score: 3, Touché) by LancePodstrong on Thursday February 05 2015, @02:37AM
Sounds like pine beetles in the Southeast are a bigger problem than you think. Could a changing climate be one of those things weakening trees to the pine beetles?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bradley13 on Thursday February 05 2015, @07:46AM
Do note the emphasis - the primary concern of the US Forest Service is the impact on logging. Where one might suppose that the Forest Service is there to look out for the forest, in fact, the service has been pretty much captured by the logging industry. It maintains a huge network of roads used exclusively for logging; forest decisions are made based on the needs of the industry. The decades old policy of preventing forest fires is a prime example: fires are essential to the health of forests, and should be encouraged. Frequent fires are also easier to control, because they burn cooler and stay smaller. But no, fire damages timber that might otherwise be harvested.
It's exactly the same for things like the pine beetle: a naturally occurring insect, doing what it does naturally. Forests survive, if individual trees don't. However, it inconveniences the timber industry because their harvest of trees is sub-optimal.
Why are they harvesting in national forests anyway? Have you seen some of the monotonous replanting they do? Acres and acres of identical trees. Let the timber industry raise trees as crops on their own land, and tell the US Forest Service to truly look after the forests as opposed to the timber.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday February 05 2015, @08:23PM
I'm sure you are largely correct, but one reason that fires are discouraged is that many people have built expensive homes in areas where a "controlled burn" could easily get out of control and destroy them.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 05 2015, @05:24PM
i am the original 'i live in the south poster'. it sounds like both the Mountain and Southern pine beetle prefer rocky/mountainous environments. i live in mississippi. no mountains - just lots of pine trees.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Freeman on Wednesday February 04 2015, @10:02PM
Nothing will grow. We will all gradually end up living in a world that resembles Dune. :-) Now, I recommend that you learn how to ride Worms. It might come in handy one day.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 05 2015, @03:48PM
Wasn't Arrakis terraformed for the worms in the first place. Just sayin... after all, who is *really* running the government?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Wednesday February 04 2015, @10:20PM
Plant lots of different species of trees from a lot of biomes -- whatever happens to the climate, something will find the new climate good and will survive. As for the old species, they'll survive if they can hack the new climate, invasive species or no. If they can't, they're goners anyway. Maybe they need to be planted much further north.
(Score: 1) by glyph on Thursday February 05 2015, @11:08AM
Introducing foreign species is often catastrophic exactly because they adapt too well. You can't just increase biodiversity by smooshing a bunch of species into the same space.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jmorris on Thursday February 05 2015, @12:15AM
News flash. The Earth has been warmer than the more probable AGW claims and the Earth has been colder. The trees are still here. They will adjust without a Director of Forest Ecology planning it all out. The trees will be here when we are either extinct or transhumans floating around the galaxy in computers.
Will they be the same trees in the same locations? Probably not. Thats life.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by dw861 on Thursday February 05 2015, @01:46AM
Yes, this is true. The one thing that makes anthropogenic climate change different from the max/min scenarios that jmorris describes, and more alarming, is the rate of change (rather than the temperature extremes).
In any event, from this perspective Nature will always do just fine. The core concern about climate change is not about the trees, it is anthropocentric--even when talking about trees one is discussing people. What will happen to millions of people in the process? Our imagined Director of Forest Ecology has a few goals. No doubt one is caring and tree-centered. But, when talking about foresters, be they extinct or computer floating transhumans, just as pressing is to make sure that there is a merchantable forest to harvest as timber. Employment; the dollar. That too is life.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday February 05 2015, @08:37PM
It's not even faster than some past climate changes. Of course, those were catastrophic changes, involving things like mass extinctions. I rather suspect that a Giant Meteor Impact causes a faster change in climate than the anthropogenic changes, also the eruption of the Deccan Taps.
That said, the climate seems to be currently changing faster than most species are able to adapt to. There are exceptions, but most are becoming invasive in areas closer to the poles, and abandoning areas closer to the equator. (Nearer the equator, however, the changes have been less pronounced, so the effects are considerably smaller...so far.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by LancePodstrong on Thursday February 05 2015, @02:22AM
You are correct. This article is about managing the process so that the mixture moving forward is a mixture of trees that is advantageous to us for the purposes of lumber, habitat for game animals, and recreation. You know what happens to your garden if you just let it go. Nothing you want grows and you end up with a patch full of weeds.
(Score: 1) by hottabasco on Thursday February 05 2015, @12:56PM
"The Earth has been warmer than the more probable AGW claims and the Earth has been colder": cant make sense of that, can anybody help me out?
(Score: 1) by LancePodstrong on Thursday February 05 2015, @02:39PM
Here's my expanded interpretation:
"In the past, the earth has been both warmer than probable AGW estimates and colder than at the present time."
(Score: 3, Informative) by jmorris on Thursday February 05 2015, @05:08PM
Some of the more 'imaginative' AGW theories do call for warming outside of the bounds of normal climate variation. I was excluding them from consideration right up front lest the thread get hijacked by some of those outlandish claims. Sorry if I was unclear. My point was that even if one accepts AGW, unless one also accepts the most outlandish claims by the least scientific fringe we aren't talking about a variation outside of global historical ranges. Disruption of human activity and expectations? Yup. Trees going extinct? No.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Nuke on Thursday February 05 2015, @02:45PM
The trees are still here. They will adjust without a Director of Forest Ecology planning it all out.
Depends on where "here" is. Large areas of desert exist today in areas which were once fertile, such as in Mesopotamia, now Iraq. Many such desertifications occurred naturally and slowly in the past, but today humans have the power (and numbers) to make or break aspects of nature, such as forests.
Someone above said that the greatest threat to trees is simple people cutting them down, either for building material or simply to make way for building. I am in the UK and have some maps going back to the 1930's. Comparing them with modern maps it is frightening how much forest has been destroyed in 80 years, and how much additional built-up area there is. Like Robin Hood's Sherwood Forest - I don't know what romantic pictures Americans might of it, but today it just consists of about 3 separate patches of woodland, any of which you could walk across in about 20 minutes, just parks really. Once it was vast.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 05 2015, @04:43PM
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Friday February 06 2015, @12:10AM
Fortunately, this is already a solved problem. Just set aside a bunch of land and allow it to revert to woodland.
I am not sure if that is meant to be ironic. Perhaps it is not where you are - the USA with wide open spaces? In the UK there is such pressure on land now through over-population (the Scottish Highlands excepted) that any bit of land is a legal battleground between developers and conservationists. It is very rare for any bit of land to be allowed to"revert to woodland" and the few such projects get a great deal of hype and publicity to cover for the fact that many times as much is destroyed to make way for housing and supermarkets.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday February 05 2015, @08:32PM
FWIW, the desertification of the Sahara was probably caused by goats (and sheep?) eating the seedlings as the sprouted, so no new trees grew to replace the old ones. But getting back from desert to forested land isn't that simple. For one thing, once the forest goes, temperatures rise, erosion increases, etc.
The current process is different, as what's happening is an increase in temperature causing stress to previously well adapted species. The appropriates ways to handle this are to either cool things down again or to import species adapted to warmer, and probably drier, climates. But they won't have the same advantages as the current species do, so that will be predictably resisted. Possibly this could best be handled by setting up test plots, and allowing those that are usefully successful to increase in size over the years. (And a part of the problem is you don't know for sure whether the new climate will be drier or wetter. Warmer is practically certain practically everywhere, but wetter or drier is harder to predict.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday February 05 2015, @08:46PM
A lot of forests grew up in the wake of retreating glaciers at the end of the last ice age, when conditions were far more suitable for them. A healthy, mature forest can maintain itself even when conditions change somewhat, or if the conditions change slowly enough. Most of these forests, if they decline because of conditions changing too rapidly or simply being over cut, will never grow back. You can claim trees are trees, something will grow, but there are entire ecosystems dependent on these forests and the loss of a particular forest and its species of trees also means a decline in the species dependent on those forests. The phrase "you can't see the forest for the trees" is applicable to forest management as it is currently run.
It also can change the risks of wildfires. You only need to look to the US west, where logging and clearing areas that should never have been cut has replaced mature forests, which rarely burn catastrophically, with a more brushy, resinous, quick burning scrub. Combine that with unnatural fire suppression policies and recent droughts and you have a ticking time bomb.