The disappearing forests of Alaska

Compare this with this story - As globe warms, Alaska is cooling down. However compare that with As Permafrost Thaws, Scientists Study the Risks

Boreal forests dying as Alaska warms

In almost every patch of boreal forest in Interior Alaska that Glenn Juday has studied since the 1980s, at least one quarter of the aspen, white spruce and birch trees are dead.

Alaska Daily News,

31 December, 2012

"These are mature forest stands that were established 120 to 200 years ago," said Juday, a professor of forest ecology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks' School of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences. "Big holes have appeared in the stands."

At his Dec. 7 presentation during the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union held in San Francisco, Juday spoke of a "biome shift" now under way in Alaska -- the boreal forest is suffering in the Interior and flourishing in western Alaska.

Juday presented his observations of boreal forest trees on remote and road-accessible plots along the Tanana River downstream of Fairbanks and in the White Mountains National Recreation Area. He also included results from tree-coring trips he and his colleagues performed down the Tanana, Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers.

In the Interior, Juday sees significant numbers of dead trees, which he attributes to higher air temperatures here since the mid-1970s. Along with less moisture available to trees, some of the warmer temperature events have triggered infestations of insects, like the aspen leaf miner, the larvae of which reduces the efficiency of leaves. Warmer temperatures have reduced other trees' ability to produce sap, which helps prevent insect attack. The result has been trees pushed to their limits.

"The prospects are not good for survival (of white spruce, aspen and birch)," Juday said. "This . . . is not just an unlucky break at a stand or two, but is consistent with the first stages of a serious rearrangement of forest in the landscape across northern Alaska.

"The Interior forest is likely to retreat to cooler microsites, such as shaded slopes and somewhat higher elevations," Juday said. "Various kinds of stunted woodland, shrubland, and grassland are likely to expand where formerly our productive forest grew."

In western Alaska, where summers are cooler and more snow and rain falls, the trees have responded to temperature increases with greater growth.

"This positive response extends out to the very western limit of tree establishment and survival at the edge of the tundra," Juday said. "The trees there are generally healthier than they have been at any previous point in their lives."

Juday said the current changes within Alaska's boreal forest will probably continue unless warmer air temperatures that started in the mid-1970s return to those levels or cooler.

"The future of the Alaska boreal forest is shifting decisively to western Alaska," he said.

Southeast Alaska trees are also reacting to recent changes in climate, said Greg Wiles of The College of Wooster in Ohio. Wiles also spoke about his research at the AGU meeting.

Wiles used weather records from Sitka written down by the Russians as early as 1830 and later continued by Americans. He and his coworkers compared them to mountain hemlock growth (determined by studying tree rings) and have seen the trees' reactions to warmer air temperatures at different places on mountain slopes.

"Lower elevation (trees) are hurting, mid-elevation trees are tracking the change and high elevations are taking off," Wiles said. "All of a sudden, conditions are right for (the higher trees)."

Alaska rainforest mountain hemlocks seem to be experiencing the same "biome shift" Juday described in Alaska's boreal forest, Wiles said.

"These trees are adapted to the Little Ice Age," Wiles said, referring to a cold period on Earth from about 1550 to 1850. "Now we're out of the Little Ice Age."

Wiles wondered if the mountain hemlocks have enough mobility to occupy new elevation niches that may be better suited for the trees.

"Is change happening faster than (these trees) can migrate?" he asked.

As pheasants disappear, hunters in Iowa follow

Desdemona Despair,

31 December, 2012

By JOHN ELIGON

31 December 2012

ELKHART, Iowa (The New York Times) – Mike Wilson glared dejectedly through the mist on his silver-frame glasses at the soggy field of tall, dense brush, tilting the barrel of his 12-gauge shotgun toward the gray clouds.

“All I want to do,” he said, “is see a bird at this point.”

More than two hours into this pheasant hunt, the colorful rooster that one of Mr. Wilson’s hunting partners had shot that morning was now a distant memory. Only one other pheasant had graced the skies since, and it was too far off to even try a shot.

The pheasant, once king of Iowa’s nearly half-a-billion-dollar hunting industry, is vanishing from the state. Surveys show that the population in 2012 was the second lowest on record, 81 percent below the average over the past four decades.

The loss, pheasant hunters say, is both economic and cultural. It stems from several years of excessively damp weather and animal predators. But the factor inciting the most emotion is the loss of wildlife habitat as landowners increasingly chop down their brushy fields to plant crops to take advantage of rising commodity prices and farmland values.

Over the last two decades, Iowa has lost more than 1.6 million acres of habitat suitable for pheasants and other small game, the equivalent of a nine-mile-wide strip of land stretching practically the width of the state. And these declines have been occurring nationwide.

The overall amount of land enrolled in the Agriculture Department’s Conservation Reserve Program has dipped to 29.5 million acres from a peak of 36.7 million in 2007. Under the program, the government pays owners a certain rate to plant parts of their land with grass and other vegetation that create a wildlife habitat. Land in the program is most suitable for pheasants and other upland game, and owners often make it available for hunting. But as the price of corn and other crops has risen, so have land values, and the rates paid by the government under the program have been unable to keep up.

Each of the top seven pheasant hunting states have seen sizable reductions in the number of pheasants shot and the number of pheasant hunters over the last five years, according to data provided by Pheasants Forever, a group advocating for the expansion of wildlife habitat and land for public hunting. Last year, there were more than 1.4 million pheasant hunters nationally, a drop of about 800,000 in two decades. [more]