I have reposted the article below. The finance committee will be recommending to the full council that an additional $40,000 from an existing reserve account be added to the $22,000 already in the budget to make a $62,000 line item to fight the Western Pine Beetle. This money will be used to try to protect high risk trees at the Cemetery and others on Public Property. Apparently NORD has $10,000 in their budget for their fight against the Pine Beetle.
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By Don Plant Monday, January 22, 2007, 12:01 http://www.kelownadailycourier.ca/article_4309.php
The Okanagan has a little more than a year to prepare for waves of pine beetles experts predict will kill most pine trees in the Valley.The mountain pine beetle has decimated pine stands in Prince George and Kamloops. The insect is creeping south, and computer modelling suggests Kelowna will be hit hard in 2008. The tree kill is expected to peak here in 2010.“We want to be ready. We have to put programs in place to minimize the damage as much as we can,” said Mario Lanthier, an expert in pest management and plant health in Kelowna.“We’ll be able to save a few trees in high-profile areas with a concerted effort. But we will not stop the tide. We’ve decided to face reality and get ready.”
A two-day conference of plant-management companies that opens in Kelowna on Thursday will focus on pine beetles. Mark Fercho, environment manager for the City of Prince George and a speaker at the conference, says we should expect clouds of beetles to attack pines from above.“Unless you protect the (tree) canopy against waves of beetles dropping from above, there’s no guarantee you can protect them,” Fercho said in an interview. “Necessity is the mother of invention. Maybe, by the time the big waves reach Kelowna, someone will have figured out a method that actually repels the beetles during a heavy flight. For us, nothing worked.”The mountain pine beetle’s southern cousin, the western pine beetle, has already killed thousands of Ponderosa pines in the Central Okanagan. Because the mountain-beetle populations are much larger, foresters predict the pending attacks will be calamitous here.The Kelowna area may be more vulnerable than Prince George because we have large, open landscapes of Ponderosa pines, while Prince George forests have a greater mix of lodgepole pines interspersed with other tree species.“In Kelowna, it will have a more dramatic visual effect,” said Fercho. The mountain beetles swarmed lodgepole pines in Prince George en masse in 2004 and 2005.
Fercho estimates fewer than 10 per cent of the trees survived. Taxpayers in Prince George have spent $2.5 million on managing the beetle problem. The province and federal government have contributed another $3 million to remove dead trees and control the infestation within the city limits.Workers have removed more than 500 logging truckloads of pines from city parks and green space in Prince George. No method to protect the trees really worked when the beetle pressure was high, Fercho said. Pesticides, pheromones and thinning can help to a degree, but the trees become overwhelmed when too many insects swarm a stand, he said.
In Kelowna, the western beetles have generally flown from tree to tree near the ground. Because the mountain beetles fly in waves from outside cities and drop from above, they start infesting the trees from the top, said Fercho. Pesticides aren’t effectively applied to the tops of the trees, so the mountain beetle can penetrate the top third. Even if a poisoned insect bores through the bark and dies, its fungus still infests the bark, Fercho said.The same dynamics apply to wrapping pines with insect screening, a technique the City of Kelowna is testing at Rutland Lion’s Park. “When the big flights come, it doesn’t matter if the trees are wrapped in a quarter-inch plate steel. They just hit everything,” said Fercho.
People in Prince George covered tree trunks with shampoo, white paint and plastic, to no avail. The city ended up cutting entire stands of mature pines, even if they were healthy, in residential neighbourhoods that didn’t rank as highly as parks or other high-profile areas.That way, there was less risk of interface fires in urban forests that would eventually die.“Then we could rehabilitate the site and replant it,” Fercho said. “It’s a way to save money for the taxpayer because you don’t have to go back every year and drive over the same ground, which prevents reforestation.”The conference, at the Ramada Lodge, begins at 9 a.m. Thursday. For information, call 250-488-0899.
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