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The Saik’uz First Nation has been granted $ 477,931 through the Federal Mountain Pine Beetle Program to develop and implement a regional trades, technology and business development program in the Vanderhoof area.
The Saik'uz Skill Development and Training Institute (SSDTI) will deliver high priority industry training programs initially delivered by existing accredited institutions.
Courses offered will include trades, technology and small business start up, human resource and business management. Saik'uz will partner with the local Community Futures to provide the business training. This project will enhance course delivery, increase job placement rates in the participating First Nations' communities, and provide a catalyst to local business attraction and retention.
The widening sea of red trees surrounding Helena will soon likely be accompanied by the buzz of chain saws, and city officials believe the scope of the cutting work - and replanting - could cost up to $2 million.
Helena natural resources coordinator Brad Langsather said the city will need roughly $825,000 just to cut the dead trees he observed this spring in Helena's 2,140 acres of open spaces.
Langsather recently told officials the infestation of the mountain pine bark beetle will result in a landscape change unseen since the birth of the Capital City. Many of the ponderosa pines in the Helena area are dead, and most of the living trees will die in the next few years.
Today, Cathy McLeod, Member of Parliament for Kamloops - Thompson - Cariboo, on behalf of the Honourable Lynne Yelich, Minister of State for Western Economic Diversification, announced federal support for the development and upgrading of a trail system in the 100 Mile House area.
"Our Government is taking action to assist communities that have been challenged by the Mountain Pine Beetle," said Mrs. McLeod. "This investment will support our local tourism industry and build a stronger economic foundation for the future."
The District of 100 Mile House will assess already existing trail systems, identify linkage opportunities, and undertake signage, mapping and promotional activities. By linking community trails between 70 Mile House and Wells, this project would provide social, recreational and tangible business opportunities to many communities in the Cariboo region. Project activities will include: trail development and upgrading for a multi-purpose trail; updating trail mapping; improving trail signage; trail marketing; trail clean up and establishing a trail maintenance program to ensure trail safety and sustainability.
Did you fill up your tank before July 1? That’s when the provincial carbon tax increased by 50 per cent, from 2.4 cents per litre to 3.6 cents per litre. Get used to it, the tax will increase next year, and the year after.
Similar increases apply to diesel, natural gas and other fossil fuels, each July 1 until 2012 when they will represent a tax of $30 per tonne of greenhouse gas emissions.
Richmond MLA John Yap, B.C.’s new minister of state for climate action, referred questions about the carbon tax to the finance ministry last week. He said he is aware of the ongoing scientific debate about climate indicators, but evidence such as the unchecked spread of pine beetle show that inaction has its own risks.
Scientists fear that the swarms of mountain pine beetles that have killed more than half of all lodge pole pines in British Columbia may eventually make their way into forests in the US.
And while cold winters typically kill most of the beetle larvae, the region has recently witnessed unusually higher temperatures that have allowed the beetle to thrive for longer periods of time.
The beetle has recently been found in Alberta, and scientists told BBC News that they could threaten jack pine forests throughout North America.
A plague of tree-killing beetles which swept across British Columbia is threatening to spread east, to the US.
The mountain pine beetle has killed more than half of all lodge pole pine in the province and is now active in neighbouring Alberta.
Cold winters usually kill off the beetle larvae, but the region has been warmer than usual in recent years.
A new research project probing the genetic blueprint in the war between the mountain pine beetle and the lodgepole pine trees it attacks is expected to yield key information on how molecular-level triggers in a tiny pest can destroy a landscape as vast as Canada’s northern pine forests.
Using $7.8 million in new reseach funding, scientists intend to look at the outbreak as a disease that’s infecting an organism. In this case the organism is the endless pine forest that sweeps across Canada from the British Columbia Interior to Newfoundland.
They want to discover the molecular interactions between the players in what has to be one of nature’s most dramatic battles: a war with the potential to kill a continent-wide eco-system.
The battle against the pine beetle epidemic is being fought at microscopic levels.
Genome Canada, Genome B.C. and Genome Alberta have committed nearly $8 million to a research project designed to map the basic building blocks of trees and the pests that attack them.
Research leader Dr. Joerg Bohlmann says genomes could eventually help scientists fight the pine beetle infestation.
Summer fire seasons in the great forests of the West have always hinged on elements of chance: a heat wave in August, a random lightning strike, a passing storm front that whips a small fire into an inferno or dampens it with cooling rain.
But tiny bark beetles, munching and killing pine trees by the millions from Colorado to Canada, are now increasingly adding their own new dynamic. As the height of summer fire season approaches, more than seven million acres of forest in the United States have been declared all but dead, throwing a swath of land bigger than Massachusetts into a kind of fire-cycle purgatory that forestry officials admit they do not yet have a good handle on for fire prediction or assessment.
Dead trees, depending on how recently they died, may be much more flammable than living trees, or slightly more flammable, or even for a certain period less flammable. The only certainties are that dead forests are growing in size and scale — 22 million more acres are expected to die over the next 15 years — and that foresters, like the fire-tower lookouts of old, are keeping their eyes peeled and their fingers crossed.
