Forest Service: Staggering 66 million dead trees in California

The Forest Service, in a statement released Wednesday, blamed the tree die off on four years of consecutive drought, a “dramatic” rise in bark beetle infestation and warmer temperatures.

The survey was done over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where more than 40 million trees were found to be dead or dying from 2010 to October of last year, bringing the total to 66 million in just those areas over a five-year span. The problem is more pronounced in Southern and Central California south of the Eldorado National Forest, but foresters say they’ve seen signs of the blight spreading north.

California forests were hit hard by another year of drought, losing record numbers of trees since last fall and setting up a potentially devastating wildfire season that’s already begun to do damage in the southern half of the state, a new federal survey shows.

Experts say the problem is likely to become more common as California grows hotter and drier because of global climate change.

“Tree dies-offs of this magnitude are unprecedented and increase the risk of catastrophic wildfires that puts property and lives at risk”, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack stated in the release.

Those trees have been spotted in flyovers since October, and are located across 760,000 acres in six counties: Fresno, Kern, Madera, Mariposa, Tuolumne and Tulare.

For instance, ecologists say that in the Tahoe Basin, tree mortality doubled in 2015.

Trees are dying at a scary rate.

Summertime fires in California cause less property damage than the fires that are fanned by dry Santa Ana winds in the fall and winter, but they sap more firefighting resources, research published past year showed. The Forest Service has felled over 77,000 hazardous trees, the agency reports.

“We were really trying to figure out how fires will change in southern California in the future”, said James Randerson, a University of California, Irvine earth scientist who contributed to the study.

It’s not just a lack of water that’s killing California’s trees. The explosion in firefighting costs, in turn, has forced federal land managers to shift money that should be spent on forest restoration.

“Forcing the Forest Service to pay for massive wildfire disasters out of its pre-existing fixed budget, instead of from an emergency fund like all other natural disasters, means there is not enough money left to do the very work that would help restore these high mortality areas”, Vilsack said. Just past year, the agency spent more of its allocated budget on fighting wildfires than on all other services combined.

While numerous trees in Colorado were left to decompose, the beetles have killed five times more forest in California. Unfortunately, unless Congress acts now to address how we pay for firefighting, the Forest Service will not have the resources necessary to address the forest die-off and restore our forests.