Warming climate drive tree-killing southern pine beetles north

NEW YORK — A recent study shows warming climate has expanded tree-killing southern pine beetles' habitats and forests in the northern U.S., and southern Canada could be soon ravaged by the pest in the coming decades.

Southern pine beetle, one of the world's most aggressive tree-killing insects, has typically only lived in Central America and the southeastern United States.

Researchers at Columbia University project that the beetles will spread along the Atlantic coast up to Canada's Nova Scotia by 2020. By 2080, the pest should infest red and jack pines which extend across more than 270,000 square miles in U.S. and Canada, which is roughly the size of Afghanistan.

Thousands of adult beetles can kill a tree in just two months as they carve S-shaped tunnels under the bark. According to the U.S. Forest Service, infestations of pine beetles have cost an estimated annual timber loss of $100 million from 1990 to 2004 in the southeastern U.S.

The study was published in the journal Nature Climate Change.