Saving a Species:The decline of whitebark pines threatens the Greater Yellowstone Area, as researchers search for solutions.

摘要

KARL BUERMEYER STOPS HIS WHITE PICKUP ON THE SIDE OF A DIRT road and motions to a few whitebark pine trees rising from a mat of pinkish-purple fireweed. On one of the tree trunks, there's a scar of missing bark. Thick streams of now-solidified sap have spilled over the wound. A non-native fungus brought over from Europe called blister rust made a sugary canker that rodents subsequently gnawed away — hence the missing bark. Everything above the point of infection will eventually die, including the tree's cones. If the tree can't produce cones, it no longer contributes its genes to the landscape and is considered by researchers and forest managers to be ecologically dead.