"Spruce beetle and mountain pine beetle outbreaks have impacted millions of acres of conifer forest from Alaska to northern Mexico"..........."These species are native to North America, and periodic outbreaks have shaped the structure and composition of conifer forests for millennia"................ "To characterize the response of a suite of mammalian species to beetle‐induced changes in vegetation in the southern Rocky Mountains, Colorado Parks and Wildlife(WPS) deployed cameras at 300 randomly selected sites during summer 2013–2014"............. . "Ungulates(deer, elk, moose) generally exhibited a positive association with bark beetle outbreaks"............ "Elk were positively associated with severity, but not a decade after outbreak.........."Mule deer exhibited the opposite relationship"............."Moose used forest stands adjacent to preferred willow habitat, peaking3–7 yr after an outbreak commenced, but only in high severity locales"............"Black bears, American marten, snowshoe hares, and porcupines did not appear to be substantially influenced by beetle activity"............"Red fox use was positively associated with beetle stands after a decade, but overall use declined as severity increased"............."Red squirrel use declined in severely impacted stands, likely as a response to diminished cone crops".................."Golden‐mantled ground squirrels and chipmunks exhibited a shallow negative relationship after a decade passed as did coyotes"

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click on the title of this paper(underscored) to read full article:
“Ecosphere”: Mammalian responses to changed forest conditions resulting from bark beetle outbreaks in the southern Rocky Mountains.

Colorado Parks & Wildlife(CPW) study investigates wildlife response to forest conditions from bark beetle outbreaks in Colorado

| April 20, 2019; CPW

Deer and other animals were studied on their response to beetle outbreaks.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife

DENVER — As Colorado’s private and public forests recover from insect and disease outbreaks and other disturbances, humans and wildlife are adjusting to significant environmental changes. Spruce beetle and mountain pine beetle outbreaks may have changed the way you recreate, but have you thought about how wildlife are responding?

That’s precisely the question research scientists from Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the U.S. Forest Service attempted to answer in a recently published paper in the journal “Ecosphere”: Mammalian responses to changed forest conditions resulting from bark beetle outbreaks in the southern Rocky Mountains.

Randomly selected sampling sites (gray circles) where passive infrared game cameras were deployed in spruce‐fir (green) and lodgepole pine (yellow) forests in Colorado, USA, 2013–2014. Brown and orange are the approximate extents of spruce beetle and mountain pine beetle impacts in spruce‐fir and lodgepole pine forests, respectively, as of 2014.

“It’s such a far-reaching event, both in terms of the amount of the state impacted and how far into the future this impact will ripple,” said author Jake Ivan, a senior scientist in the Mammals Research Section of Colorado Parks and Wildlife. “As a first cut, we wanted to try to get a handle on how various species altered their use of these impacted areas, and we focused on lodgepole pine and spruce-fir systems as those two types of subalpine forest were hardest hit (by mountain pine beetle and spruce beetle, respectively).”

Wildlife Technician Kat Bernier with Colorado Parks and Wildlife with one of the game cameras she installed in a recent study.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife

To do this, the researchers hired a team of technicians to deploy game cameras at 300 randomly located sites in subalpine forests across the state. The sites represented a gradient of beetle activity from green forests with no beetles to forests that had been impacted more than a decade prior to sampling. The cameras were mounted low to the ground and pointed at a “lure tree” where a piece of wool, soaked in that most universal of all wildlife lures — peanut butter — was tied. This setup allowed researchers to obtain photos of the various mammalian species living in the vicinity, from chipmunks to moose.

The effort returned over 300,000 photos of 26 species.

“As is often the case with big changes to a landscape, the response varied widely by species,” Ivan said. “There were species that responded positively and used these impacted areas more intensely, some species that responded negatively, and others that didn’t seem to care at all.”

Ungulates were among the big winners in this changed system, although their response varied. Elk, for example, tended to increase their use of impacted areas in the decade after a beetle outbreak, responding most strongly in areas where the beetle impact was most severe with more dead trees.

Mammalian species that exhibited a positive association between use of forested stands and beetle activity (either years since the outbreak occurred, severity, or both). Curves and 95% confidence intervals represent model‐averaged responses across all fitted curves described in Fig. 2. From left to right, panels indicate predicted model‐averaged responses for cases where 10%, 50%, and 90% of the overstory in a stand is killed by beetle activity. From top to bottom, panels show predicted responses for elk, mule deer, and moose. Probability of use was estimated to vary little between the spruce‐fir and lodgepole pine stands, so responses were pooled across habitat types.

Use of beetle-impacted areas by moose, however, increased immediately after trees died, peaked three to seven years after the outbreak, then declined. Mule deer showed increasing use of beetle-impacted areas with each year after an outbreak, but unlike elk, their use was not strongly related to severity. Researchers attribute increased use to increased forage and hiding cover available as understory and shrub cover increases once the forest canopy opens up.

Red squirrels were among the few species to be negatively impacted.

Mammalian species that exhibited a negative association between use of forested stands and beetle activity (either years since the outbreak occurred, severity, or both). Curves and 95% confidence intervals represent model‐averaged responses across all fitted curves described in Fig. 2. From left to right, panels indicate predicted responses for cases where 10%, 50%, and 90% of the overstory in a stand is killed by beetle activity. From top to bottom, panels show predicted responses for red squirrel, golden‐mantled ground squirrel, chipmunk spp., and coyote. Red squirrel use was estimated to vary between the spruce‐fir (blue) and lodgepole pine (gray) stands. For other species, habitat stratum was less important and responses were pooled across habitat types.

“I imagine their decreased use is largely related to the loss of cone crops, which take a big hit when all of the mature trees in a stand die,” Ivan said. “That’s the main food source for squirrels in these systems, and storing those cones in middens so they can get at them later is what helps get them through the winter.”

Mammalian species that exhibited little association between use of forested stands and beetle activity (either years since the outbreak occurred, severity, or both). Curves and 95% confidence intervals represent model‐averaged responses across all fitted curves described in Fig. 2. From left to right, panels indicate predicted responses for cases where 10%, 50%, and 90% of the overstory in a stand is killed by beetle activity. From top to bottom, panels show predicted responses for American marten, black bear, snowshoe hare, and porcupine. For snowshoe hares and porcupine, use was estimated to vary between the spruce‐fir (blue) and lodgepole pine (gray) stands. For other species, habitat stratum was less important and responses were pooled across habitat types.

While the response of some species is easily explained, for others, an easy explanation doesn’t exist. Pine martens, for instance, commonly prey on red squirrels, yet use of beetle-impacted stands by pine martens did not follow the noticeable decline of red squirrels. Instead, marten use remained completely unchanged through time, regardless of severity of the outbreak.

“This project gave us a better understanding of what to expect in the coming years as beetles finish their march through the green forests in the state,” Ivan said. “It gives us a sense of issues that may arise both in the non-game world, and in the game world.”

For instance, results from this project suggest that snowshoe hares, the primary food source for threatened Canada lynx, may weather the bark beetle outbreaks largely unscathed. However, lynx may be at increased risk during years of low hare abundance when they would normally turn to red squirrels to get them through.

Mammalian species that exhibited mixed associations between use of forested stands and beetle activity (either positive association with years since the outbreak but negative association with severity, or vice versa). Curves and 95% confidence intervals represent model‐averaged responses across all fitted curves described in Fig. 2. From left to right, panels indicate predicted responses for cases where 10%, 50%, and 90% of the overstory in a stand is killed by beetle activity. From top to bottom, panels show predicted responses for red fox and yellow‐bellied marmot. Use was estimated to vary little between the spruce‐fir and lodgepole pine stands, so responses were pooled across habitat types for these species.

On the game side, scientists expect that in some areas, elk will focus their habitat use in severely impacted areas during early season hunts. However, access and travel in these patches is difficult for hunters due to down timber. So, in some places, it’s possible to end up with a mismatch between elk availability and hunter access.    

“On the one hand, it is a bit sad to see all of these dead trees on the landscape, but on the other, we’re witnessing a once-in-a-millennia event, and Colorado is ground zero,” Ivan said. “It’s quite a spectacle from an ecological perspective.”

Bark beetles are native to Colorado and have been around for eons. Their life cycle involves burrowing into the inner bark of mature trees as adults and laying eggs in galleries.

The eggs hatch into larvae, which then travel through the bark, eating and growing. Eventually the larvae pupate into adults, which exit the bark, fly to another tree and start the process anew. The loss of inner bark from adult and larval activity interrupts the flow of water and nutrients and kills the tree. Large expanses of mature forest across the west, coupled with climate changes such as drought that simultaneously stress trees while boosting insect productivity have created current epidemic conditions.