Pic-7: Whitebark pines at Crater Lake National Park. © 2009 DeLene Beeland
View of Crater Lake National Park from the rim and framed on the left by whitebark pine branches and needles. Whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) trees are in trouble. Some species, like Clark’s nutcrackers, red squirrels and grizzly bears, depend upon the trees for fatty seeds. But a blister rust is killing the conifers at an exceptional rate. Whitebark pines live at high elevations in the western U.S. and Canada; click here for a detailed distribution map. In Crater Lake, they are one of four dominant forest zones: ponderosa pine forest, lodgepole pine forest, mountain hemlocks, and whitebark pine woodlands. White pine blister rust was accidentally introduced to the U.S. from Europe around 1910, and it is contributing to large declines of the whitebark pine tree which is now thought to be functionally extinct in about one-third of its historic range. In Crater Lake, whitebark pine is succumbing to the rust, which is the number-one killer of this tree in the park. {1} A large, healthy and wind-gnarled stand of them can be found at the park’s Cloudgap lookout on Rim Drive. For some background on white pine rust and how it kills trees, watch this video:
When I visited Crater Lake NP last September, we saw evidence of the whitebark pine epidemic in the form of dead, twisted tree trunks scattered throughout the forest rimming the caldera’s slopes. But one place it was most evident was on Wizard Island, the cinder cone volcano present in the extinct caldera. (For more on the natural history of Crater Lake NP, see my posts here and here.) Below is a view of Wizard Island, from a vantage point just slightly to the left of Pic-7.
Pic-8: Wizard Island. This was shot just to the left of Pic-7. © 2009 DeLene Beeland
To get to Wizard Island, the Park Service runs a ferry tour. So we hopped on a morning boat and rode the blue waters to the Island.
Pic-9: Caldera boat tour that drops day hikers at Wizard Island. © 2009 DeLene Beeland
It took about 40 minutes to climb to the highest point,and we passed several whitebark pine trees that had little mesh baggies tied around their cones. Several graduate students were also running around staking different trees, monitoring the mesh baggies, and tying new ones. Though I did not get the chance to talk to them, I think they were doing a study monitoring for the seeds that are naturally resistant to the blister rust. Apparently, somewhere around 5 percent or more of whitebark pine trees in Crater Lake NP are naturally resistant to the rust, according to a National Park Service ranger I talked to on this trip. She said that the service was attempting to collect as many of these rust-resistant seeds as possible, in case the pathogen wiped out all the park’s trees and they had to replant them. Given what we saw at the top of the cinder cone, I could envision a future where the park was empty of its whitebark pines.
Pic-10: Dead whitebark pine trees, atop Wizard Island. © 2009 Matt Ertl.
That’s me in Pic-10, standing next to one of about two dozen dead whitebark pines. They rimmed the cinder cone like ghostly toothpicks. It was sad, and haunting. It’s possible some of the dead trees we saw atop the summit were other species, but given the large quantity of bagged trees I spied on the way up, and the number of partially dead whitebarks we saw, I think my guess is pretty safe that these were all victims of the rust.
For more information about white pine rust, visit this juicy USGS page full of great information, and a list of publications.
NOTES:
{1} Murray, M.P., and Rasmussen, M.C. 2003. Non-native blister rust disease on whitebark pine at Crater Lake National Park. Northwest Science. 77(1): 87-91.
{2} Wilson, Brendan et al. 2008. Whitebark pine and white pine blister rust in the Rocky Mountains of Canada and northern Montana. Canadian Journal of Forest Research. 38(5): 982-995.
Pine blister rust is very tough on a number of pine species. Like all invasive exotic diseases it is difficult to control because the native plants did not develop any resistance to the disease. In the long haul it will likely eliminate some N. American pine species, others will adapt (thousands of years). In the mean time we should be sure to select some of the highly impacted species and preserve them for posterity.
Bill:www.wildramblings.com
Do you know anything about how it came to N.A.? It was imported somehow to the Vancouver area, I read… but there was no mention of how or the context (and I admit I did not look very hard….).
[...] Lake National Park that I’ll post here (at least for awhile). My previous post described the white pine rust pathogen we saw evidence of while touring Wizard Island in the extinct caldera of former Mt. Mazama, an [...]