Officials are continuing to carefully watch the movement of mountain pine beetles in Alberta, says a provincial official.
The latest results are a mixed bag.
Surveys conducted at 179 sites across Alberta’s pine forests in May and June found a wide variation in the over-winter mortality for the beetle, whose populations cut off nutrient supplies to trees and eventually kill them.
“It’s a little bit across the board,” said Duncan MacDonnell of Sustainable Resource Development in Alberta. “The good news was that it wasn’t as bad, and by bad I mean beetles’ survival, wasn’t as high as it might have been expected given that we had a fairly mild winter.”
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Samples were taken from more than 1,000 trees and showed that mountain pine beetle populations decreased over the winter in the regions of Slave Lake, west to Grande Prairie and Grande Cache. Numbers remained static, or were up slightly, in parts of central Alberta and in areas north of Peace River.
MacDonnell said the good news is that the bug’s movement east, toward Saskatchewan’s boreal forest, hasn’t progressed.
