The emerald ash borer, an invasive beetle native to Southeast Asia, threatens the entire ash tree population in North America and has already changed forested landscapes and caused tens of billions of dollars in lost revenue to the ash sawtimber industry since it arrived in the United States in the 1990s.
The emerald ash borer, an invasive beetle native to Southeast Asia, threatens the entire ash tree population in North America and has already changed forested landscapes and caused tens of billions of dollars in lost revenue to the ash sawtimber industry since it arrived in the United States in the 1990s. Despite the devastating impact the beetle has had on forests in the eastern and midwestern parts of the U.S., climate change will have a much larger and widespread impact on these landscapes through the end of the century, according to researchers.
“We really wanted to focus on isolating the impact of the emerald ash borer on biodiversity, forest composition, biomass and other factors,” said Stacey Olson, program coordinator and legal assistant at Resources Legacy Fund. Olson completed the research as part of her master’s thesis at Penn State. “We found that emerald ash borer and its impact on ash trees has serious implications for forest change at the site level, but at the broad landscape level, the climatic changes over the next century were much more important in terms of forest composition and species diversity.”
The researchers used a forest simulation model to examine the effects of the emerald ash borer and climate change on a forested area of northeast Wisconsin through the year 2100. The area includes the Menominee Reservation. The Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin has been sustainably harvesting timber from the forest for more than 150 years. The scientists reported their findings in the journal Ecosystems.
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