Inside Colorado's quest to tackle dangerously unhealthy forests

There is life after death for Colorado’s forests.

But to get there, the people who manage them must solve an economic quandary.

Colorado’s 834 million dead trees can start anew as your favorite rocking chair, the mulch in your garden, heat for Front Range cities — you name it. The problem is: The cost of removing and transporting them can dwarf the worth of their wood.

Dead standing trees make up about 1 in 15 standing trees on Colorado’s 24.4 million forested acres, according to 2016 data from the Colorado State Forest Service. And in 2017, invasive pests like the spruce beetle continued to whittle away the state’s forests. The spruce beetle infested 206,000 acres last year, bringing the pest’s toll to 1.78 million acres since 1996.

“You can’t remove dead tree material at this scale,” said Seth Davis, an assistant professor of forest and rangeland stewardship at Colorado State University, referring to trees killed by the spruce beetle. “It gets to be such a significant event that there’s really no way for management agencies to deal with this material.”

Read more: https://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2018/03/01/colorados-challenges-quest-tackle-dangerously-unhealthy-forests/381403002/