In the News

Can We Save Our Sugar Pines?
date posted: December 5 2005

Lake Tahoe Report #123
June 28, 2005
By John Cobourn and Heather Segale

Some of Tahoe’s most beautiful and majestic trees are under attack by a fungal pathogen from China. This nonnative parasite is called the white pine blister rust. Introduced into the western United States through Vancouver Island around 1900, white pine blister rust has devastated white pine forests in many parts of the continent. Currently it is infecting sugar pines in and around the Tahoe Basin. Unfortunately, it kills about 90 percent of the sugar pines that become infected.

Sugar pines are the largest pine trees in the world and produce the largest cones. While Sugar Pine Point State Park is particularly famous, these trees are found in many parts of the Tahoe Basin.

John Pickett, of the Sugar Pine Foundation, is working to try to save the sugar pines and other white pines that are threatened in our region. He is raising funds and forming partnerships with the USDA Forest Service and other organizations. His goal is to develop a management strategy to restore the natural regeneration of sugar pines and Western white pines in the Lake Tahoe Basin.

Efforts to control the spread of the white pine blister rust have failed, so Pickett is searching for the rare trees that have genetic resistance to the disease. When he finds trees that appear to be resistant, he will obtain genetic screening to determine if they are indeed resistant. He will then collect cones for seed from trees that prove to be resistant. He and his partners will produce thousands of seedlings for reforestation from these seeds.

The white pine blister rust infects all white pines, which have five needles in each bundle. Ponderosa and Jeffrey pines have three needs in each bundle, and lodgepole pines have two needles in each bundle. Local white pines that make up part of our beautiful mixed conifer forests include the Western white pine and the whitebark pine, in addition to the sugar pine. The Western white pine’s close relative, the Eastern white pine, was protected during colonial times, because the king of England thought they were the best trees in the world for the masts of the king’s navy. The whitebark pine is said to have co-evolved with the Clark’s nutcracker, which is the only bird with a strong enough beak to harvest seeds from its tough, woody cones.

The whitebark, Western white and sugar pines all play important roles in our ecosystem, and all are threatened. One little known benefit of the whitebark and Western white pines is their ability to stabilize the ground and slow the melting of the snowpack at high elevations. This helps to extend the water storage function of the Sierra snowpack by preventing early melting.

If you have a sugar pine or other white pine in your neighborhood, look for indications of infection, including individual branches that die and turn brown suddenly, and bark on these branches that becomes cracked and mottled. The rest of the tree looks normal, and each year, a few more branches die. An arborist can prune out the dead and infected branches to prolong the life of the tree.

The blister rust spends part of its life cycle in members of the ribes genus of shrubs, which includes currents and gooseberries. While these shrubs are native and generally desirable, it might be a good idea to remove any that are growing directly underneath white pines.

Pickett hopes to be planting 50,000 sugar pine seedlings a year throughout the Tahoe Basin in the near future, but the Sugar Pine Foundation needs more partners and funding to carry on its focused research. For more information, go to www.sugerpinefoundation.org.

Watch for the “Lake Tahoe Report” in the Tahoe Daily Tribune each Wednesday, and tune in to KOLO-TV News Channel 8 Tuesdays at 5 p.m. to learn more. The “Lake Tahoe Report” is a collaborative effort of the Lake Tahoe Environmental Education Coalition, University of Nevada Cooperative Extension, UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center and the California State Water Resource Control Board. For more information, contact Heather Segale, UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center, (530) 583-3279, or logon to www.lteec.org or www.tahoe.unr.edu.