Abstract
Mountain pine beetle (MPB) has become an invasive forest pest of mature pine in western North America as it spreads beyond its former endemic range. Management actions such as timber harvest can reduce the spread of MPB but may affect species of conservation concern like woodland caribou. Our goal was to inform MPB management within caribou ranges by exploring the impacts of MPB on caribou habitat–focusing on terrestrial lichens, an important winter food for caribou. We evaluated differences in lichen cover among four MPB management actions: timber harvest, wildfires, leaving MPB killed trees as-is, and single-tree cut-and-burn control. We found little evidence that leaving MPB killed trees as-is or controlling MPB using single-tree cut-and-burn impacted lichen cover. However, we found that lichen cover was lower in timber harvested and burned areas compared to intact undisturbed forest but only 10 to 20 years post-disturbance, respectively. Our results suggest that despite short-term reductions in lichen cover, using timber harvesting and prescribed burns to control MPB may balance management needs for MPB while maintaining lichen cover over time. However, using timber harvesting and prescribed burns to manage MPB is likely to have detrimental population-level effects on caribou by increasing the proportion of disturbed habitat and thus predators within caribou ranges. Among the four management actions that we evaluated, the cut-and-burn control program balances the need to limit the spread of MPB while also limiting negative impacts on caribou food. Our work addresses some of the challenges of managing competing forest and ecosystem values by evaluating the consequence of forest pest management actions on an important food resource for a species-at-risk.
Highlights
Invasive species are a major source of ecological and economic loss [1,2,3]
We focused on the impacts of Mountain pine beetle (MPB) and MPB management on terrestrial lichen because adequate food resources and nutrition are necessary to maintain sustainable caribou populations [51,52], and because caribou habitat use can be closely linked to the availability of forage [53,54]
If we consider alternate MPB management actions, which are timber harvesting and wildfire, our research showed that there was less lichen cover initially in timber harvested and burned areas, but that lichen increased with age
Summary
Invasive species are a major source of ecological and economic loss [1,2,3]. In an effort to mitigate negative impacts of invasive species, land managers typically employ aggressive eradication programs [4,5]. Management actions for species eradication can have. Mountain pine beetle and the caribou conservation dilemma necessarily reflect the views of funding entities, and funding entities had no involvement in the design of the study or in interpretation of results. These funding sources did not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials
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