Abstract
The present mountain pine beetle infestation in forests in British Columbia ranks among the largest ecological disturbances recorded in Canada so far. These recent outbreaks are thought to have been favoured by large-scale climatic shifts, and may foreshadow outbreaks of a similar magnitude in North American forests over the coming decades. The associated forest dieback could result in substantial shifts in evapotranspiration and albedo, thereby altering the local surface energy balance, and in turn regional temperature and climate. Here we quantify the impact of the Canadian pine beetle disturbance on the local summertime surface energy budget, using measurements of evapotranspiration, albedo and surface temperature, obtained primarily through remote sensing. We show that over the 170,000 km2 of affected forest, the typical decrease in summertime evapotranspiration is 19%. Changes to the absorbed short-wave flux are negligible, in comparison. As a result, outgoing sensible and radiative heat fluxes increased by 8% and 1%, respectively, corresponding to a typical increase in surface temperature of 1 °C. These changes are comparable to those observed for other types of disturbance, such as wildfire, and may have secondary consequences for climate, including modifications to circulation, cloud cover and precipitation.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 12 print issues and online access
$259.00 per year
only $21.58 per issue
Buy this article
- Purchase on Springer Link
- Instant access to full article PDF
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
Change history
27 June 2014
In the version of this Article originally published, the flive values in Fig. 4c should have been listed in the reverse order, with '0.0–0.1' corresponding to the black curve and '0.9–1.0' to the red curve, as shown below. This error has now been corrected in all online versions of the Article.
27 June 2014
Nature Geoscience 6, 65–70 (2013); published online 25 November 2012; corrected after print 27 June 2014. In the version of this Article originally published, the flive values in Fig. 4c should have been listed in the reverse order, with '0.0–0.1' corresponding to the black curve and '0.9–1.0' to the red curve, as shown below.
References
Walton, A. Provincial-level Projection of the Current Mountain Pine Beetle Outbreak: Update of the Infestation Projection Based on the 2010 Provincial Aerial Overview of Forest Health and Revisions to the Model (BCMPB. v8) (Ministry of Forests and Range, Research Branch, 2011).
Hicke, J. A. & Jenkins, J. C. Mapping lodgepole pine stand structure susceptibility to mountain pine beetle attack across the western United States. For. Ecol. Manag. 255, 1536–1547 (2008).
Macias Fauria, M. & Johnson, E. Large-scale climatic patterns and area affected by mountain pine beetle in British Columbia, Canada. J. Geophys. Res. 114, G01012 (2009).
Bale, J. et al. Herbivory in global climate change research: Direct effects of rising temperature on insect herbivores. Glob. Change Biol. 8, 1–16 (2002).
Bentz, B. et al. Climate change and bark beetles of the western United States and Canada: Direct and indirect effects. BioScience 60, 602–613 (2010).
Kurz, W. et al. Mountain pine beetle and forest carbon feedback to climate change. Nature 452, 987–990 (2008).
Boon, S. Snow ablation energy balance in a dead forest stand. Hydrol. Processes 23, 2600–2610 (2009).
Rex J., Dubé S. Hydrologic Effects of Mountain Pine Beetle Infestation and Salvage Harvesting Operations. Mountain Pine Beetle Initiative Working Paper (Pacific Forestry Centre, 2009).
Schnorbus, M. A Synthesis of the Hydrological Consequences of Large-scale Mountain Pine Beetle Disturbance, Mountain Pine Beetle Initiative Working Paper (Pacific Forestry Centre, 2011).
Varhola, A., Coops, N. C., Weiler, M. & Moore, R. D. Forest canopy effects on snow accumulation and ablation: An integrative review of empirical results. J. Hydrol. 392, 219–233 (2010).
Vinukollu, R., Wood, E., Ferguson, C. & Fisher, J. Global estimates of evapotranspiration for climate studies using multi-sensor remote sensing data: Evaluation of three process-based approaches. Rem. Sens. Environ. 115, 801–823 (2011).
Wang, K. & Dickinson, R. A review of global terrestrial evapotranspiration: Observation, modelling, climatology, and climatic variability. Rev. Geophys. 50, RG2005 (2012).
Schmid, J. Net precipitation within small group infestations of the mountain pine beetle, Vol. 508 (USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station, 1991).
Spittlehouse, D. Proc. 25th Conf. on Agricultural and Forest Meteorology (American Meteorological Society, 2002).
Harris, J., Centre, P. F. R., Dawson, A. & Brown, R. Evaluation of Mountain Pine Beetle Damage Using Aerial Photography: Flathead River, B.C., 1980 Information report (Canadian Forestry Service, 1982)..
Wiedinmyer, C., Barlage, M., Tewari, M. & Chen, F. Meteorological impacts of forest mortality due to insect infestation in Colorado. Earth Interact. 16, 1–11 (2012).
Wilson, K. et al. Energy partitioning between latent and sensible heat flux during the warm season at FLUXNET sites. Wat. Resour. Res. 38, 1294 (2002).
Mölders, N. Land-Use and Land-Cover Changes (Springer, 2012).
Bonan, G. Forests and climate change: forcings, feedbacks, and the climate benefits of forests. Science 320, 1444–1449 (2008).
D’Almeida, C. et al. The effects of deforestation on the hydrological cycle in Amazonia: A review on scale and resolution. Int. J. Clim. 27, 633–647 (2007).
Pielke, R. Influence of the spatial distribution of vegetation and soils on the prediction of cumulus convective rainfall. Rev. Geophys. 39, 151–178 (2001).
Amiro, B., MacPherson, J. & Desjardins, R. BOREAS flight measurements of forest-fire effects on carbon dioxide and energy fluxes. Agric. For. Meteorol. 96, 199–208 (1999).
Mölders, N. & Kramm, G. Influence of wildfire induced land-cover changes on clouds and precipitation in interior Alaska—A case study. Atmos. Res. 84, 142–168 (2007).
Mu, Q., Heinsch, F., Zhao, M. & Running, S. Development of a global evapotranspiration algorithm based on MODIS and global meteorology data. Rem. Sens. Environ. 111, 519–536 (2007).
Mu, Q., Zhao, M. & Running, S. Improvements to a MODIS global terrestrial evapotranspiration algorithm. Rem. Sens. Environ. 115, 1781–1800 (2011).
Wan, Z. MODIS Land-surface Temperature Algorithm Theoretical Basis Document (LST ATBD) (Institute for Computational Earth System Science, 1999).
Wan, Z., Zhang, Y., Zhang, Q. & Li, Z. Quality assessment and validation of the MODIS global land surface temperature. Int. J. Rem. Sens. 25, 261–274 (2004).
Wanner, W. et al. Global retrieval of bidirectional reflectance and albedo over land from EOS MODIS and MISR data: Theory and algorithm. J. Geophys. Res. 102, 17143–17161 (1997).
Lucht, W., Schaaf, C. & Strahler, A. An algorithm for the retrieval of albedo from space using semiempirical BRDF models. IEEE Trans. Geosci. Rem. Sens. 38, 977–998 (2000).
Schaaf, C. et al. First operational BRDF, albedo nadir reflectance products from MODIS. Rem. Sens. Environ. 83, 135–148 (2002).
Rudolf, B. & Schneider, U. Proc. 2nd Workshop of the Int. Precipitation Working Group IPWG 231–247 (2005).
Rudolf, B., Becker, A., Schneider, U., Meyer-Christoffer, A. & Ziese, M. The New GPCC Full Data Reanalysis Version 5: Providing High-Quality Gridded Monthly Precipitation Data for the Global Land-Surface GPCC Status Report December 2010 (2010).
Swenson, S. & Wahr, J. Post-processing removal of correlated errors in grace data. Geophys. Res. Lett. 33, L08 (2006).
Environment-Canada. Water Survey of Canada: HYDAT Database National Water Data Archive (201-401 Burrard St., Vancouver, BC, V6C 3S5, 2011). ftp://arccf10.tor.ec.gc.ca/wsc/software/HYDAT/.
Acknowledgements
This work was made possible by grants from the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. We acknowledge valuable exchanges with G. Bonan, S. Déry, S. Dubé, P. Lawrence, P. Link, D. Moore, J. Oyler, S. Running, M. Schnorbus, A. Swann, S. Swenson, A. Varhola and Z. Wan.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
I.F. initially conceived the project. H.M. refined the scope of the project, designed and implemented the analysis methods, and wrote the paper. P.J.K. helped brainstorm ideas throughout this process. Both I.F. and P.J.K. contributed suggestions to several early drafts of the manuscript.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
Supplementary information
Supplementary Information
Supplementary Information (PDF 649 kb)
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Maness, H., Kushner, P. & Fung, I. Summertime climate response to mountain pine beetle disturbance in British Columbia. Nature Geosci 6, 65–70 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1642
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1642
This article is cited by
-
Asymmetric influence of forest cover gain and loss on land surface temperature
Nature Climate Change (2023)
-
Biophysical feedback of global forest fires on surface temperature
Nature Communications (2019)
-
Polygamy and an absence of fine-scale structure in Dendroctonus ponderosae (Hopk.) (Coleoptera: Curcilionidae) confirmed using molecular markers
Heredity (2016)
-
Multi-scale predictions of massive conifer mortality due to chronic temperature rise
Nature Climate Change (2016)
-
Toward accounting for ecoclimate teleconnections: intra- and inter-continental consequences of altered energy balance after vegetation change
Landscape Ecology (2016)