Surveyors tally about 1.1 million acres of dead fir trees in drought-stricken Oregon, a historic die-off.
Fir die-off as observed during this year’s aerial survey in the Fremont-Winema National Forest in southern Oregon.Drought-stricken Oregon saw a historic die-off of fir trees in 2022 that left hillsides once lush with green conifers dotted with patches of red, dead trees.
“When I looked at it and crunched the numbers, it was almost twice as bad as far as acres impacted than anything we had previously documented,” said Danny DePinte, an aerial survey program manager for the U.S. Forest Service. “Nature is selecting which trees get to be where during the drought.” The observers rate the intensity of damage and map its location. Pilots fly in a grid pattern with flight lines about 4 miles apart to cover every swath of the forest.Paper maps of the past have been replaced today by Samsung Galaxy tablets that track the plane’s progress and make mapping easier — and probably more accurate.Brent Oblinger, a plant pathologist on the Deschutes National Forest, while in the process of conducting a portion of the survey.
Healthy trees typically can defend themselves against these threats. When beetles drill into a trees’ bark, for example, a healthy tree can push the beetles out by excreting pitch, a gooey substance, where they entered the tree, Kohler said. DePinte said damage was most pronounced in White, Shasta and Red firs on the eastern side of the Cascade Mountain range’s crest, where the climate is drier.Oregon’s average temperatures have risen about 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895, according todelivered to the state’s Legislature. The severity of drought has increased over the past two decades in part because of human-caused climate change, the report says. Summers in Oregon are expected to become warmer and drier.
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