Mountain Pine Beetle in Lodgepole Pines

[adignan]

The Mountain Pine Beetle has been destroying Lodgepole Pines in Canada, Wyoming, and Colorado for the past 12 years. This conceptual diagram shows how the beetle bores into the trunk of the pine tree and creates a vertical gallery with smaller horizontal galleries in which eggs are laid. The larvae, once hatched, eat the phloem of the tree, cutting off all nutrients and water to the rest of the tree and killing the tree within a few weeks of hatching. This is my first attempt at a conceptual diagram, and my first time using the Online Conceptual Diagram Creator. The diagram isn't complete; it does not include the Blue Stain Fungus (Grosmannia clavigera) that grows on the beetle's antennae and blocks the tree's sap response (and it doesn't include the sap response itself - the tree's defensive system to the invader), and ideally I would make the tree itself red-brown instead of green to show that the tree is dead from the beetle. That being said, any feedback would be appreciated! This diagram was created as an assignment for Dr. Todd Lookingbill's Landscape Ecology class at the University of Richmond; it is not going to be used in any sort of publication.

[AdrianJ]

Hi Audrey,

Great to see your diagram - thanks for sharing. You've done a great job of getting the concept across.

Notice that I also uploaded a png version so that others can easily view in their browsers. It is always a great idea to upload both the vector (svg) and raster (png) versions.

A few comments for you:

1) You mention wanting to make the tree a different color. This can be achieved with the online diagrammer by clicking the "Break Link to Reference Element" button (chain link), then ungroup. This will allow you to select the various components of a symbol and edit any aspect of it.

2) In your other post you ask about filling an area. Now that I can see your diagram, I have a better idea of your needs. In a vector shape you need to create a continuous polygon to be able to fill it, so the background area of your phloem and bark sections would need to be a proper polygon, rather than separate lines on each edge. Vector is a very different approach to drawing, but once you get the hang of it, you won't ever want to go back to raster because of the ease and precision of editing and the scalability.

3) I see that you mostly used the pencil tool. I would recommend that in most case the Path Tool is superior - with it you can eliminate the roughness of the lines by reducing the number of nodes (vertices) of each path and using the control handles (click the path twice to bring up these editing handles) to accurately define the shape of the path.