Neat. I wonder what they are doing to survey for remnant populations and how they control for local conditions.
Total aside, but I'm working on a project doing disease mapping for an agency in California. Its like watching a train wreck in real time. Human influence and climate change* are rewriting the macroflora of California in real time. Get your pictures now boys and girls because your state will not be the same in 10 years.
The biggest contributing factor (imo) is disease. I think the general public lack an understanding for the subtleties of how and why climate change, even a touch of it, is such a big deal for plant communities. Couple this with anthropocentric influence and you've got a bit of a dogs breakfast.
I'm not a beetle expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm going to use the case of the golden spotted oak borer to demonstrate why these factors combine to become far more impactful than either would be singularly. The golden spotted oak borer (GSOB) is a oak specific beetle disease that is native to north america (northern extent of its native range is apparently Arizona, majority in n. Mexico). In its native range, nights are very cold, summers are very hot. This results in enough generational dieback that it does not become a devastating disease.
Some time in the early 2000's it was introduced to eastern San Diego county. The generally accepted assumption here is that it was moved on firewood from Arizona. The mountains in San Diego have seen a massive decrease in the overall coldness of winters, and amount of winter snow. Likewise, oak is a very popular wood for home heating, and in eastern San Diego county, many people rely on burning wood for winter heating.
So lets spell this out: more mild winters: less generational dieback of the disease; more disease: more dead trees; more dead trees: more 'free fire wood'; more free firewood: more people moving around the disease.
The winters aren't cool enough (any longer; this could be argued about) in San Diego county to knock back the disease. People grab up firewood and move it around. The result is that the GSOB disease state has been moving like wild fire throughout the state. Some early estimates of habitat suitability indicate that its northern extent is likely some where north of Humboldt county/ south of Oregon.
Now, couple this with sudden oak death (moving south to north), fusarium dieback (north to south), and you've got a relative shitnado coming at the California oak woodlands. What happens when GSOB gets into some sudden oak death infected trees? Or if it becomes a vector for fusarium dieback?
Humans have moved this disease into places that don't get cold enough or hot enough to kill it. Likewise, in areas where it may have gotten cold enough to knock back the disease, it just doesn't get as cold any more (a few degrees colder, a couple times during the winter would do the trick).
The above is a good resource for information regarding the disease. The work I'm doing is related to this, and we aren't making any of our results public at the moment.
"Inside a greenhouse at her Tahoe City field station, Maloney shows off a sea of young green trees in their own containers. These 10,000 sugar pine seedlings grew from seeds Maloney and her team collected from 100 of the surviving sugar pines."
This is interesting; seems like artificial and natural selection combined. It does seem to solve the current problem, but what would be the implications? Aren't the dying trees beneficial to the ecosystem in some way (clearly they are food for the pine beetles, which are food for other animals...)?
A typical problem with invasive species is that their predators don’t also make the trip. It’s not a given that anything is eating them, micro or macro.
Dead wood left on the forest floor can help improve soil quality and water retention though, and the decay microbes and invertebrates do have their own food chain that goes as high as foxes and bears. It’s an old idea we haven’t practiced much, in part because of misguided fire suppression, and miscategorizing it as waste, instead of fodder.
The blocker being the contingent that considers the forests as nothing more than a potential strip-mine, being that said contingent has the reins currently.
Total aside, but I'm working on a project doing disease mapping for an agency in California. Its like watching a train wreck in real time. Human influence and climate change* are rewriting the macroflora of California in real time. Get your pictures now boys and girls because your state will not be the same in 10 years.
Whew. California is pretty much toast.