Impact of Mountain Pine Beetle Infestation on Snowmelt: Variations with Vegetation Structure and Geographical Locations

Abstract:

The warming climate resulted in the current outbreak of mountain pine beetles (MPB) in western and northwestern US. and Western Canada. Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, and British Columbia are also currently experiencing widespread mountain pine beetle infestations. Forest disturbance due to MPB can have a large impact on hydrological processes specifically snow accumulation and snowmelt. In those regions, spring snowmelt is a major water resource and MPB infestations can have a big impact on water resource management.

MPB infestations cause forest canopies to gradually diminish over the course of several years, they therefore impact snow interception and radiation balance at snow surface, thus snowmelt. Past studies on this topic have achieved contradicting results. This study focuses on understanding how the impacts of MPB infestations on snow surface radiation balance and snowmelt rates vary with vegetation structure and geographical locations.

We selected four sites in northern Colorado and four sites in the Cascade Mountains in Oregon with varying intensities of MPB. Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) data from SNOTEL sites and MPB-caused forest disturbance data extracted from Landsat time series disturbance maps were used for our analysis. Our results show that MPB sites show larger snow accumulation for sites in Colorado and Cascade Mountains. However snowmelt rate varies differently. For sites in Colorado, snow melts faster in the MPB sites than in the healthy forest sites. In contrary, in the Cascade Mountains, snow stays longer in MPB sites than in healthy and undisturbed sites.

Our modeling study shows that shortwave radiation is a dominant factor for radiation balance in the mid-latitude region (Colorado). There, MPB infestations lead to increased shortwave radiation and faster snowmelt. However, long wave radiation plays an important role for radiation balance in high latitude areas. MPB infestations decrease longwave radiation and result in snow staying longer in the infested region than the non-infested regions in high latitudes (Cascade Mountains). Current and future work includes characterizing the impact of MPB on snow accumulation and snowmelt as functions of vegetation structure and geographical locations.