Fungus, beetles, climate change and a lack of fire have all contributed to the species’ decline across high-altitude landscapes in the Northwest.
“Nobody is funding whitebark pine study and research,” Bob Keane, a U.S. Forest Service research ecologist with the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula, said during a meeting of grizzly bear managers in West Yellowstone last week. “If we did nothing, we would ensure that whitebark pine would drop off.”
24 percent and more than
56 percent of trees monitored since 2002 have died. In a monitored area in the Idaho Panhandle, there was
98 percent mortality in whitebark pine.
“That’s pretty dramatic,” said John Schwandt, who works for the Forest Service’s Forest Health Protection in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. “No wonder it’s being looked at as a threatened and endangered species in some areas.”
Keane, Schwandt and others addressed the joint meeting of the Yellowstone Grizzly Coordinating Committee and the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee because the tree’s seeds provide a high-calorie source of food for grizzly bears in the fall.
“We don’t know ultimately what the impact of the loss of whitebark pine will be on grizzly bears,” said Mark Haroldson, a wildlife biologist for the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team.
Since whitebark pine seed crops are not annual, grizzly bears have long coped without them as a reliable food source. Haroldson said studies have shown male grizzlies in the Yellowstone area get as much as
79 percent of their calories from meat, compared with
46 percent for females.
“There’s been no noticed decline in body condition in bears if there is a lack of whitebark pine,” he said. “Bears are finding alternative foods.”
What does happen, though, is that bears will wander to lower elevations in search of food in years when whitebark pine seed crops are bad. That makes it more likely that bears will come into contact with people, especially hunters, in the fall. More contact raises the likelihood that bears will be killed.
“Bear survival is mostly influenced by where the bears live,” Haroldson said. “Bears outside of the recovery zone have a lower survival rate.”
The conservation recovery zone for bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem includes all of Yellowstone National Park and some surrounding forests and wilderness areas in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. The zone was established when the bears were listed as an endangered species. Two years ago, the bears were delisted but are still closely managed.
Part of the problem in studying ways to restore whitebark pine is that much of its habitat is in high-mountain terrain, much of which is in roadless or wilderness areas where aggressive restoration such as planting, treating trees with chemicals to fight off fungus or beetles and setting fires to clear land for seedlings is not allowed.
“We have to plant to speed time for regeneration,” Keane said, since the trees are slow growing.
He sees wildland fire use, where some naturally ignited fires are allowed to burn under allowable conditions, as one of the most effective tools for clearing lands in the future. Whitebark pine, which are long-lived trees, are adept at surviving in burned areas because the Clark’s nutcracker buries the pine tree seeds in burned-over soil.
“Whitebark pine was at one time 500 feet lower in elevation because of wildfires,” Keane said. “They don’t compete well with other conifers.”
Keane and a fellow researcher studied ways to restore whitebark pine stands by using prescribed burns in the Bitterroot Mountains to clear out competing conifers. They also studied slash and burn as an option and worked with chemical treatment to fight blister rust, a deadly fungus that infects whitebark pine. With modern techniques, they achieved
50 percent survival of seedlings that were planted.
The researchers’ results are to be published soon, but overall he said their work proved that restoration can be achieved if the work can find funding.
The Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation is one of the few groups to fund restoration work. It provided $180,000 for projects last year. Schwandt, of the Forest Service, said the agency funded 26 projects last year at a cost of $398,000, with more than double that contributed by other groups as a match.
Whitebark pine is important to high-mountain landscapes for reasons besides its seeds’ calorie content for grizzly bears. The trees stall mountain snowmelt, providing streams with water longer into the summer. They stabilize the soils on steep ground, exposed high ridgetops where they grow, reducing erosion. The trees also act as a nursery crop for other species such as subalpine fir and Engelmann spruce.
Some of the oldest whitebark pine trees have been dated 300 to 500 years old.
Preserving the trees into the future could require a legislative change that would allow planting in wilderness and roadless areas as well as national parks, Keane said, a move that is likely to meet resistance.
“It is possible to restore these stands,” Keane said. “It will take centuries. But the important thing is to make sure it doesn’t drop off the edge.”
Brett French can be reached at (406) 657-1387 or at french@billingsgazette.com.
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