Tiny bark beetles have been causing havoc in Germany's Harz mountains, eating away at trees and killing off swaths of the spruce population. Drought — made longer and more intense by climate change — is making the problem even worse.
And even though the beetles tend to target weakened trees, in dry years the population can reproduce so much “that the beetles were even able to attack healthy spruce in large numbers,” he said. “In some regions there are now no more spruces.”
Michael Müller, the Chair of Forest Protection at the Technical University in Dresden, said there are “very strict requirements for the use of pesticides” which can be very effective in getting rid of the bugs, although the chemicals are sometimes frowned upon for their potentially harmful environmental side effects.
Media officer Michael Rudolph shows burrows created by bark beetles at the inner side of bark pulled from an infested spruce tree in a forest in Lower-Saxony state forests at the Harz mountains near Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany, Thursday, July 27, 2023. In the longer term, mixing other tree species into the forest could be a solution, Ahrenhold said. “It makes sense to plant other conifers that can cope better with these conditions, especially on south-facing slopes and on very dry soil,” he said.
Officials realized by the 19th century that planting just one type of tree over and over again wasn’t a good idea ecologically, but “the economy countered that realization because spruce was such an attractive species,” he said. Spruce was the preferred tree for industrial forestry, paper mills and pulp.
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