Drought, heat threaten future of balsam firs popular as Christmas trees

The balsam fir accounts for about 20 per cent of all trees in New Brunswick, and the tree is most commonly associated with Christmas.

University of New Brunswick forestry professor Anthony Taylor was heading down a highway in the spring of 2018 when his wife pointed out clumps of red-coloured trees.

Taylor recognized them as dead balsam firs, and so began a research project to examine what was killing the trees favoured by many Canadians to decorate their homes at Christmas.

Six years later, in a paper recently published in the journal “Frontiers in Forests and Global Change,” Taylor and his co-authors identify the cause of the die-off in western New Brunswick and eastern Maine as drought and high temperatures brought on by climate change.

“Identifying the broad scale climate anomalies, such as a drought, associated with the reported sudden balsam fir mortality in 2018 could prove useful to determine the likelihood of future mortality in response to climate change,” the study says.

Taylor said he was shocked by “that much” death of balsam firs.

“It’s quite, quite abnormal to have such wide-scale death of these balsam fir trees,” he said in a recent interview. “And it really stood out.”

The balsam fir accounts for about 20 per cent of all trees in New Brunswick. But with its fragrant needles and triangular shape, the tree is most commonly associated with Christmas.

More than 95 per cent of Christmas trees grown in the province are balsam fir and about 200,000 of those are exported, mostly to the United States, Taylor said.