With Half Of Known Whitebark Pine Stands Already Gone, USFWS Moves To List Keystone Species

[hatrack]

After waiting more than a decade, whitebark pine may finally receive endangered species protection. But some say the listing proposal may need modification to be effective. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service this week announced it was considering listing whitebark pine as a threatened species and was opening a 60-day public comment period.

University of Colorado biology professor Diana Tomback has argued for a listing since her graduate work two decades ago when she discovered a bird, Clark’s Nutcracker, helps to spread whitebark pine seeds. “This is a proposal for listing. That means it’s on-track, barring any unanticipated comments. What it does is raises the profile of whitebark pine within the agencies in terms of management consideration. It’s a mandate for them,” Tomback said. “Where it grows, whitebark pine acts as a keystone and foundation species. Its presence at high elevation offers watershed protection – its canopy shades snowpack so there is downstream flow all summer.”

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In Montana, rocky alpine areas once harbored live trees that have turned into “gray ghosts,” denuded whitebark pines that died from either mountain pine beetle infestations or white-pine blister rust, a non-native fungal disease. Within the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem where grizzly bears used to use whitebark pine seeds as an autumn food source, the whitebark pine population is down by 80%, said Paradise Valley entomologist Jesse Logan. Stands in 18 of 22 mountain ranges in the greater Yellowstone area are nearly gone.

“With the combination of the ’88 wildfires, white-pine blister rust – which is increasing – and the beetles, 80% or more is probably pretty accurate,” Logan said. The Natural Resources Defense Council nominated the whitebark pine for listing in 2008, and the agency determined that listing was warranted in 2011. But another 260 species were also waiting for U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decisions on whether they deserved endangered species protections. So the agency held off on listing the whitebark pine. In the meantime, the Forest Service has continued cutting some of the trees down.

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https://missoulacurrent.com/outdoors/2020/12/whitebark-pine-threatened/

[2naSalit]

1. You can see whole mountainsides...

Where the pine trees are all red just before they become grey ghosts. I live in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem and it's getting less green every year. And then there are the fires.

I have a hunch that the dams which reduced river flow and salmon runs to the ocean from the Rocky Mountain headwaters is a major culprit in the decline of forest health overall. Talk about keystone species, the salmon are one of the primary factors in forest health in the region, the obstruction to their ancestral breeding grounds is killing the ecosystems of the breeding grounds.