Climate Change Pushes Aspens to Brink

New weather patterns exacerbate other issues, like the nasty bark beetle

By Victoria Floethe, Newser User

Posted Dec 21, 2008 5:53 AM CST

(Newser) – Huge swaths of the Rocky Mountain landscape is being transformed as the region's signature tree, the aspen, goes into rapid decline, reports the Smithsonian. Climate change and surging population of the bark beetle is causing the grim phenomenon known as SAD (sudden aspen decline). The beetle is a mere twelfth-of-an-inch long but is capable, en masse, of cutting off trees’ nutrient supply.

SAD is spurred by the region’s extreme drought and high temperatures—symptoms of global warming—which have weakened the trees, allowing more disease and insect attacks. “They basically starve to death,” explained a scientist. If the sudden bark beetle influx remains a mystery, climate change is “the common theme that’s hitting everybody in the face," said an ecologist at the University of Colorado,

[Images (4)]

[Quotes (1)]

Nursery owner Brent Jordan looks on next to Quaking Aspen trees, ready for sale in Gresham, Ore., early this year. (AP Photo/Greg Wahl-Stephens)

Benjamin Reyes Ortis, 45, wraps young aspen trees in cardboard to protect them from damage during a shipment earlier this year in Gleed, Wash. (AP Photo/Shannon Dininny)

Barren aspen trees. (©ilovemypit)

Longer periods of drought and a warmer climate is killing off the West's aspens. (Shutterstock)

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The forest of our grandparents' time wasn't the best of all possible forests, ours isn't the best of all possible forests, and the forest of the future won't be, either. - Dan Binkley,
Colorado Forest Restoration Institute

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Climate Change Pushes Aspens to Brink