As the lodgepole pine forests west of Laramie turn redder and redder with each season, it’s not hard to look at all those dead and dying trees as tinder piled and awaiting a spark. Indeed, fire seems to be the logical next step for an aging forest decimated by insects.

The mountain pine beetle also visited the lodgepole pine forests of Yellowstone National Park in the decades before the summer 20 years ago in which they burned so famously, perhaps portending what’s ahead for southeast Wyoming in the coming years.

Indeed, fire management officials are bracing for flames as they await the inevitable death of almost all the lodgepoles in the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest. They’re educating homeowners and protecting communities.

But not everyone who studies wildland fires and insect epidemics will tell you a catastrophic fire is certainly coming. While the cause of forest fires is a complex balance of fuel and weather, the relative importance of one versus the other is still open for debate, and the mountain pine beetle may not be the harbinger of fire that it seems.

In the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest, 90 percent of lodgepole pines greater than five inches in diameter will be dead in the next two to three years.

Tony Tezak, forest fire management officer for the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest, estimated that more than 150,000 acres of the forest are currently infected by the mountain pine beetle, and the spread is inevitable, leaving a swath of red-needled trees across Wyoming and Colorado.

A fire in these red forests would almost certainly spread to the treetops, fueled by the dead needles.

“Once you make that transition from the ground to the crowns, you have a catastrophic fire. It’s very, very difficult to control,” Tezak said. “It’s exposed to the wind. There’s nothing to stop it.”

But that danger is short-lived, as the needles remain on the dead trees for just a couple seasons before falling to the ground.

At that point, scientists say, the fire danger would actually be lower as the dead trunks turn gray and gradually fall during the next few decades. Without needles, tree canopies are much less dense and in some cases no longer touching – “this stage is analogous to trying to set fire to a row of telephone poles,” Dominik Kulakowski, an assistant professor of geography at Clark University who has researched disturbances in forest ecosystems, said in an e-mail. He used to be a research scientist at the University of Colorado. Things get more complicated as those dead trees fall or are blown over, a process that will continue for many years and lead to the growth of smaller trees that suddenly have sunlight and room.

A paper written by Kulakowski and scientists from Colorado State University, University of Colorado and University of Idaho theorizes that the danger of a crown fire may increase over the decades following a pine beetle outbreak for two reasons.

First, fallen trees that catch fire could create flames large enough to reach tree canopies.

Full Story: http://www.laramieboomerang.com/articles/2008/08/23/
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