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episode 22 season 1
The Lodgepole Pine, Welcome back to Valerie’s Variety Podcast, with your host me, Valerie Moss todays show is short and sweet. I’m calling these Two
Minute Tuesdays or TMT’s. As I’ve been doing more and more research for my episodes and working full time, it doesn’t leave enough in the kitty to record and produced timely, so instead of releasing less often I’ve decided to do these short spurts in between the full episode segments. Let me know what you think. My focus as always will be Calgary, this great city, and all that’s captured within it. Enjoy the episode.
Calgary is known for the Lodgepole Pine Trees. Pinus contorta, with the common names lodgepole pine and shore pine, and also known as twisted pine, and contorta pine, is a common tree in western North America. It is common near the ocean shore and in dry montane forests Like all pines (member species of the genus Pinus), it is an evergreen conifer. Pinus contorta is a fire-dependent species, requiring wildfires to maintain healthy populations of diverse ages. They have serotinous cones. This means that the cones are closed and must be exposed to high temperatures, such as from forest fires, in order to open and release their seeds. There is also a species of bark beetle known likely to local Albertans as the Mountain Pine Beetle native to the forests of western North America from Mexico to central British Columbia. It has a hard black exoskeleton, and measures approximately 5 mm, about the size of a grain of rice. In western North America, the current outbreak of the mountain pine beetle and its microbial associates has destroyed wide areas of lodgepole pine forest, including more than 16 million of the 55 million hectares of forest in British Columbia.
Please visit Valerie Moss.ca for all show notes and research details.