Experts set sights on saving threatened whitebark pines

Whitebark pines are tough trees.

They’re among the first plants to colonize barren ridgetops. And from thin, rocky soils, they produce oil-rich seeds that feed a host of wildlife, from squirrels to birds to grizzly bears.

But whitebark pines need help if the species is going to survive, said U.S. and Canadian scientists who gathered in Coeur d’Alene last weekend for a meeting of the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation.

The candelabra-shaped pines – an icon of the high-mountain West – face a triple threat from an introduced blister rust, a mountain pine beetle epidemic and climate change.

“I think whitebark pine is kind of in the balance right now,” said Diana Tomback, the unpaid director of the nonprofit whitebark foundation who teaches at the University of Colorado Denver. “We were agitating about whitebark pine in the late 1980s. I would say that our most dire predictions came true.”

Many whitebark pine forests are full of dead trees, with only the silvery, bleached trunks remaining.

The European blister rust kills a high proportion of infected trees, particularly in the Idaho Panhandle and Western Montana. The surviving trees are weakened and targeted by mountain pine beetles, a native pest whose reach has extended to high elevations as the winters get warmer. Climate change is also expected to reduce the zones where the trees can grow.

With government budgets shrinking, Tomback said it will take a concerted effort to keep whitebark pines on the landscape. The foundation is in the midst of a campaign to raise $100,000 for research and replanting. The money would match $100,000 in annual Forest Service funds dedicated to whitebark pine restoration.

Whitebark pines’ range extends from Canada to the Southwest, including parts of the Selkirk, Bitterroot and Cascade mountains. The trees occupy a small but important ecological niche at elevations of 5,500 feet or higher.

On inhospitable sites, whitebark pines create microclimates that allow other plants to thrive. Their high-calorie seeds are dispersed by Clark’s nutcrackers, birds whose seed caches are raided by other animals. The trees are also important to water supplies because they block the wind and prolong mountain snowmelt.

“They are unique, because they’re the only tree that can survive in those high, harsh environments,” said John Schwandt, a retired Forest Service employee from Coeur d’Alene who worked on whitebark restoration. “All sorts of things depend on them.”

The tree’s bleak outlook is compounded by slow reproduction rates. Whitebark pines can live for 500 to 1,000 years, but they don’t start producing seeds until they’re 50.

In 2011, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recognized threats to whitebark pines, determining that the tree was worthy of federal protection. But whitebark pines weren’t listed under the Endangered Species Act because of budget constraints and higher priorities within the agency. In Canada, whitebark pines are listed as endangered.

Part of the efforts to save whitebark pines is taking place in Coeur d’Alene.

For more than a decade, the U.S. Forest Service nursery on Kathleen Avenue has been working on rust-resistant strains of the tree. Forests in the Northern Rockies send in seeds from trees that survived blister-rust attacks. The nursery propagates the seeds and inoculates the seedlings with rust. The young trees are monitored in test plots to determine if they share the parent trees’ resistance.

The nursery also grafts branches from mature, cone-producing trees onto young, rust-resistant whitebark pines. Instead of waiting half a century for the trees to produce seeds, they get a cone crop in two years.

“They’re baby factories, producing as much seed as possible for us,” said Mary Frances Mahalovich, a geneticist at the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station in Moscow, Idaho.

The seed gets turned around on the Idaho Panhandle National Forests, where about 10,000 whitebark pines have been planted every year for the past five years, said Art Zack, a forest silviculturist.

The headwaters of the St. Joe River has been one of the targeted planting areas. About 80 percent of the rust-resistant trees are surviving.

“That gives me a lot of hope that the whitebark pine will figure it out,” Zack said.