Our diminishing forests – Did you know?
If you've driven in the mountains at all, you know how bad the pine beetle problem is. So sad.
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(source: Denver Business Journal)
"Did you know?
Pine beetles have killed about 3.6 million acres of pine trees in northern Colorado and southern Wyoming — equal to 5,625 square miles — an area nearly the size of Connecticut (4,844 square miles) and its neighbor, Rhode Island (1,044 square miles.)
The pine beetles first were spotted in Colorado in the late 1990s.
Of Colorado’s 1.5 million acres of lodgepole pine forests, 1.02 million acres — 68 percent — is infested with the mountain pine beetle.
The U.S. Forest Service expects 100,000 beetle-killed trees will fall over every day for the next decade in northern Colorado and southern Wyoming.
Up to 80 percent of the trees killed by pine beetles is considered off-limits to the timber industry, due to slopes that are too steep to log, or policy decisions that prohibit logging in the area."