The National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center are hosting a webinar that will present findings from a study of climate change, mountain pine beetles, and whitebark pine in the Greater Yellowstone area.
Whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) is an important, high-elevation tree that provides critical habitat for wildlife and supplies valued ecosystem services. These trees currently face multiple threats, including attack by mountain pine beetles.
The project team, Polly C. Buotte and Jeffrey A. Hicke (University of Idaho), Haiganoush K. Preisler (USFS), and Kenneth F. Raffa (University of Wisconsin), aimed to:
- Increase the understanding of the causes of the recent mountain pine beetle outbreak
- Estimate future outbreak potential given future climate change
In this webinar, Buotte will discuss how the project team developed generalized additive models of the probability of tree mortality from mountain pine beetles and then applied the best model to future climate projections. The team found that the probability of tree mortality increased with:
- Increasing winter minimum temperature
- Increasing average fall temperature
- Decreasing summer precipitation
Across all climate models, scenarios, and time periods, the average odds of whitebark pine mortality were greater in the future than in 1950-2006, and similar to or greater than the odds of mortality during the recent outbreak. These results suggest the potential for severe future mountain pine beetle outbreaks, given there are suitable whitebark pine trees present.
Join the webinar to learn more about the findings from this project.