A recently study should put to rest the notion that green lodgepole pine needles burn as fast as red ones.

But more than that, Matt Jolly said, the study could help open firefighters' eyes to the dangers lurking in mountain pine beetle-infested forests where the trees still look to be alive and doing well.

Jolly is a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Research Station and co-author of a recent study that set out to document the flammability of lodgepole pine needles during different stages of pine-beetle attack.

The researchers collected foliage from lodgepole pine trees and tested changes in chemistry and flammability in an attempt to quantify how much heat was required for those needles to ignite and how fast they would burn.

Jolly said one focus of the study was to put an end to the debate over the flammability of green needles of a healthy tree and those that have turned red after a tree has died.

"In that case, we were quantifying things that we really should already know," he said. "There were a lot of conflicting opinions out there that weren't supported by fact. There were some who said green needles burned at the same rate as red needles. There were people latching onto that idea."