Source: Opinion | Invasive Insects and Diseases Are Killing Our Forests – The New York Times
It’s not just humans. Trees also suffer plagues.
In the past 120 years, voracious insects and fungi have swept across North America with frightening regularity, laying low the chestnut, the elm, the hemlock and, most recently, the ash. Each of those trees anchored natural ecosystems, and human economies and cultures. And while climate change and wildfires grab the headlines, invasive species have so far proved to be a far greater threat to forest biodiversity in the temperate world.
These plagues have also amplified climate change. Research has found that rotting trees killed in the United States by forest pests release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a rate within the same order of magnitude as wildfires.
Much as we were unprepared for the virus that has killed more than 450,000 people in the United States and 2.2 million worldwide, we’re not ready for the next tree pandemic either.
Tree plagues differ from human ones in a few important ways. On the plus side (from a tree’s perspective), insects and diseases are often specific to a genus, so no plague can hit every tree at once. On the minus side, as Gary Lovett of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies points out, people can stay indoors and get immunized, but trees “have to stand there and take it.”
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