Though the drought is ending in much of California, it's too late for the million's of trees that have died due to the ravages of recent water shortages.
The Sierra Nevada mountains are home to 300-year-old ponderosa pines, but according to Bettina Boxall's reporting in the Los Angeles Times, the drought and beetles are killing of many of the oldest trees. "The U.S. Forest Service estimates that since 2010, more than 102 million drought-stressed and beetle-ravaged trees have died across 7.7 million acres of California forest." Boxall writes. The majority of this die-off happened last year. "The western Sierra pine forest as it was 100 years ago is not coming back," Boxall reports.
The stress from the drought left the pines vulnerable to beetles, which ultimately kill the trees. "Western pine beetles’ squiggles mar the tan inner bark, or phloem, where the dark brown females had tunneled and laid their eggs," Boxall writes. In an increasingly warm world, ecologists say the damage is unlikely to ever be reversed.
FULL STORY: What all those dead trees mean for the Sierra Nevada
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UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies
Mpact (formerly Rail~Volution)
Chaddick Institute at DePaul University
City of Piedmont, CA
Great Falls Development Authority, Inc.
HUDs Office of Policy Development and Research