Report produced by:
Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service, Pacific Forestry Centre, Victoria, British Columbia, V8Z 1M5, Canada. 2British Columbia Ministry of Forests and Range, Victoria,
British Columbia, V8W 9C2, Canada.
I think the point we can take from this study is that single tree removal of infested trees is an important tool to combat the spread of the beetle, but that harvesting healthy trees only adds to the damage done by the beetle. A healthy forest captures carbon in a "carbon sink".
A report titled "Robbing the Carbon Bank", published by Forest Ethics states, "Canada’s Boreal forests store a whopping 47.5 billion tons of carbon -- 7 times the entire world’s fossil fuel emissions.4 The Canadian Boreal stores more carbon than any other terrestrial ecosystem. Yet these forests are still open to business as usual industrial logging."
Get the report here: http://www.forestethics.org/article.php?id=1751
The Canadian Forest Service (Kurz et-al)article is published in the Journal Nature:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v452/n7190/full/nature06777.html
Total ecosystem carbon stock change for three scenarios. The
control simulation was run with no beetle outbreak, and with base harvest
and fires. The beetle simulation added insect impacts to the control scenario.
The additional harvest simulation added the management response of
increased harvest levels from 2006 to 2016 to the beetle simulation. Negative
ecosystem carbon stock change values represent fluxes from the forest to the
atmosphere (net source of carbon). The source in 2003 was, in part, the
result of the large area burned (2,440km2 in the study area) that was
included in all three scenarios.
This photo, owned by the British Columbia Ministry of Forestry and Range (http://www.gov.bc.ca/for/) was released along with the report. It shows beetle killed dead pine trees (the big ones). The striking thing is that there are a lot of green young trees growing in the understory. You can't log the dead ones without killing the live ones and they provide a carbon sink. The best response to the infestation is to leave the dead trees alone and plant more live ones. What's the chance of that?
On April 10, Greenpeace released a report warning about the pine beetle "carbon bomb".
Turning Up the Heat
Logging in Canada’s Boreal Forest could trigger “carbon bomb” impacting global climate
Logging in Canada’s Boreal Forest is exacerbating global warming by releasing greenhouse gases and reducing carbon storage, says a new Greenpeace report released today. It also makes the forest more susceptible to global warming impacts like wildfires and insect outbreaks, which in turn release more greenhouse gases.
See: http://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/campaigns/boreal/recent-developments/turninguptheheat
