June 6 on The Story: Each year, the Oregon Department of Forestry conducts aerial and ground evaluations of all the state's forests, looking for signs of death and disease. Last year's evaluation, just recently released, had some pretty grim findings. Leaving aside the historically bad 2024 fire season, ODF identified nearly 2.3 million acres of new damage last year from things like heat, drought, disease and insects. It's a problem that seems to be worsening with climate change, because the trends of rising temperatures and dropping precipitation put stress on trees which make them more susceptible to other impacts — even some that, at one time, posed little threat. Watch more The Story videos: http://bit.ly/watchTheStory Follow The Story on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheStoryKGW Follow The Story on Instagram: https://instagram.com/thestorykgw