Scientist: Money to fight beetles as fire mitigation not productive

Insect infestations are not the major cause of forest fires in Colorado, and allocating federal assistance to combat the critters would be unproductive, one scientist has told a U.S. Senate subcommittee. “The best available science indicates that outbreaks of mountain pine beetle and spruce beetle do not increase the risk of fire in most types of forests," said Dominik Kulakowski, testifying Wednesday before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests. Udall's bill, in part, seeks to provide increased federal assistance to 12 “affected" Western states, including Colorado, which have large numbers of forest lands containing disease-ridden trees caused by beetle outbreaks and other insect infestations. Kulakowski, a former research scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder and current professor at Clark University in Massachusetts, discounted this notion during his testimony. He said climate, not insects, plays the most important role in forest fires, as wildfires are more likely to occur during droughts. Scientific evidence indicates that fires do not burn more quickly or more severely in dead, disease-ridden forests than in dense, live forests under current climate conditions, Kulakowski said...more