29. Beetle 🐞

I’ve witnessed the effects of bark beetles firsthand from my travels out west. You really can’t help but notice the large patches of dead, red trees.

Why should we care?

The U.S. Forest Service published a paper called, “Bark Beetles and Climate Change in the United States” that says…

“It is clear that bark beetle outbreaks significantly influence forest ecosystem dynamics and carbon cycles, and research suggests warming summer and winter temperatures are major drivers of beetle population outbreaks across the US, and apparent range expansion in some species“

From other articles on their website, I’ve gathered that in the past, we’ve mostly cared because you can’t sell timber affected by beetles. But now, we’re starting to also be concerned with the impact this has on the forest ecosystems.

Data Gathering

I found the main stat of 59.2 million acres from the U.S. Forest Service’s website. This report was pretty interesting, but I knew I wanted to contextualize what this acreage meant.

In comes the Forest Inventory and Analysis, Fiscal Year 2019 Business Report from the USDA Forest Service. This report included a table of the forest land in each state (page 74, or 80 in the e-reader).

I used the listing of states affected from the beetle specific report, and added in the forest land acreage. With that total forest land number, I was then able to reach the 28% number.

I drew the beetle referencing this illustration from Dreamstine.