Photo: The Canadian Press
This handout image from New Brunswick shows red needles on a balsam fir.
Anthony Taylor, a forestry professor at the University of New Brunswick, was driving along the highway in the spring of 2018 when his wife pointed out clumps of red-colored trees.
Taylor recognized them as dead balsam firs and so began a research project to investigate what was killing the trees that many Canadians preferred to use to decorate their homes at Christmas.
Six years later, in an article recently published in the journal “Frontiers in Forests and Global Change,” Taylor and his co-authors identify the cause of mortality in western New Brunswick and eastern Maine as drought and high temperatures. due to climate change.
“Identifying the large-scale climate anomalies, such as drought, associated with the reported sudden balsam fir mortality in 2018 could be useful in determining the likelihood of future mortality in response to climate change,” the study says.
Taylor said he was shocked to see “so much” balsam fir death.
“It’s quite abnormal that these balsam firs are dying on such a large scale,” he said in a recent interview. “And it really stood out.”
The balsam fir accounts for about 20 percent of all trees in New Brunswick. But with its fragrant needles and triangular shape, the tree is most often associated with Christmas.
More than 95 percent of Christmas trees grown in the county are balsam fir and about 200,000 of them are exported, mainly to the United States, Taylor said.
After his observation on the highway, Taylor, along with James Broom of the University of New Brunswick and Loïc D’Orangeville of Université Laval, began analyzing various causes that could have killed the trees, including pests and climate data.
New Brunswick experienced a drought in 2017 with warm, dry days in the summer and a hot fall, and their analysis found that balsam fir is particularly sensitive to drought and high temperatures. “This dry, warm growing season the year before significantly stressed these trees and led to their demise the following year in 2018,” Taylor said.
The team also looked at historical records and discovered a similar weather event in 1986, when balsam firs had died due to drought and heat the year before. “It further confirmed our study… that climate was indeed the cause of the mortality we saw.”
Fred Somerville, president of the Canadian Christmas Trees Association, said balsam fir is one of the most popular Christmas trees, with the others being Scotch and white pines and Fraser fir. Balsam fir, he said, likes cold winters and warm, moist summers.
Somerville, who has a farm in Alliston, Ont., about 90 kilometers north of Toronto, said climate change is making the weather unpredictable. “Right now it’s not so much the heat but the lack of rainfall that would hurt us,” he said. “I would say we’ve had several dry years in the last 10 years, drier than we’d like to see. But the last two years haven’t been that bad.”
A lack of rain kills young trees or even newly planted saplings, Somerville said. Older trees’ growth is stunted if they don’t get enough rain, and they lack the bright green that Christmas craves, he said.
Matt Wright, a Christmas tree farmer who owns M. Wright Farm and Forest Ltd. in Nova Scotia, said climate change and heat are affecting most conifers, including balsam fir. “The roots are struggling because of the heat,” he said, adding that new pests are emerging and attacking the trees.
“Climate change has led to a change in the population dynamics of certain insects, especially those that overwinter in the ground, because we don’t get the deep freezes or cold temperatures that controlled when they could emerge or even survive,” Wright said.
Taylor said heat and drought have weakened the balsam fir trees, making them more vulnerable to diseases and pests they could otherwise defend against. More research needs to be done to understand how climate change will affect pests and Christmas trees, he added.
Some of the ways to mitigate the effects of climate change include planting different species to improve the resilience of forests and monitoring weather patterns, he said.
Last year was one of the warmest on record and 2024 is expected to surpass that, he said. While balsam fir diebacks are rare in 2018, they are likely to become more common as the climate warms, he added.
“The balsam fir Christmas trees that we all love, unless we do something about climate change, will be far fewer in 25 to 50 years,” Taylor said. “If we continue on the path we are on now, there will be very few balsam firs left by the end of the century.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 8, 2024.
