{"title":"Analyzing the environmental risk factors of European spruce bark beetle damage at the local scale","authors":"","doi":"10.1007/s10342-024-01662-4","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<h3>Abstract</h3> <p>The frequent outbreaks of European spruce bark beetle <em>Ips typographus</em> (L.) have destroyed huge amounts of Norway spruce <em>Picea abies</em> (L.) forests in central and Northern Europe. Identifying the risk factors and estimating the damage level is important for strategic damage control. The risk factors of forest damage by spruce bark beetles have mostly been analyzed on the landscape scale, while the in-stand risk factors have been less investigated. This study aims at exploring the local-scale risk factors in a flat area with spruce-dominated forest in southern Sweden. The investigated factors include four abiotic factors, i.e., soil wetness, solar radiation, slope gradient, and aspect, and three biotic factors, i.e., the number of deciduous trees and trees that died from attacks in previous years that remained (<em>TreesLeft</em>) and removed (<em>TreesRemoved</em>) from the forest stand. We put up 24 pheromone bags in six stands attacked by bark beetle in the previous years, resulting in different numbers of infested trees in each plot. We explored in which microenvironment a pheromone bag resulted in more colonization, the impact radius of each factor, and the necessary factors for a risk model. The environmental factors were obtained from remote sensing-based products and images. A generalized linear model (GLM) was used with the environmental factors as the explanatory variables and the damage levels as the response variables, i.e., the number of attacked trees for the plot scale, and healthy/infested for the single-tree scale. Using 50 m and 15 m radius of the environmental factors resulted in the best fit for the model at plot and individual tree scales, respectively. At those radii, the damage risk increased both at plot and individual tree level when spruce were surrounded by more deciduous trees, surrounded by dead trees that had been removed from the forest, and spruces located at the north and east slopes (315°–135° of aspect, > 2° slope). Soil wetness, solar radiation, and remaining standing dead trees in the surrounding did not significantly impact the damage level in the microenvironment of the study area. The GLM risk model yielded an overall accuracy of 0.69 in predicting individual trees being infested or healthy. Our efforts to investigate the risk factors provide a context for wall-to-wall mapping in-stand infestation risks, using remote sensing-based data.</p>","PeriodicalId":11996,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Forest Research","volume":"63 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6000,"publicationDate":"2024-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"European Journal of Forest Research","FirstCategoryId":"97","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10342-024-01662-4","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"农林科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"FORESTRY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The frequent outbreaks of European spruce bark beetle Ips typographus (L.) have destroyed huge amounts of Norway spruce Picea abies (L.) forests in central and Northern Europe. Identifying the risk factors and estimating the damage level is important for strategic damage control. The risk factors of forest damage by spruce bark beetles have mostly been analyzed on the landscape scale, while the in-stand risk factors have been less investigated. This study aims at exploring the local-scale risk factors in a flat area with spruce-dominated forest in southern Sweden. The investigated factors include four abiotic factors, i.e., soil wetness, solar radiation, slope gradient, and aspect, and three biotic factors, i.e., the number of deciduous trees and trees that died from attacks in previous years that remained (TreesLeft) and removed (TreesRemoved) from the forest stand. We put up 24 pheromone bags in six stands attacked by bark beetle in the previous years, resulting in different numbers of infested trees in each plot. We explored in which microenvironment a pheromone bag resulted in more colonization, the impact radius of each factor, and the necessary factors for a risk model. The environmental factors were obtained from remote sensing-based products and images. A generalized linear model (GLM) was used with the environmental factors as the explanatory variables and the damage levels as the response variables, i.e., the number of attacked trees for the plot scale, and healthy/infested for the single-tree scale. Using 50 m and 15 m radius of the environmental factors resulted in the best fit for the model at plot and individual tree scales, respectively. At those radii, the damage risk increased both at plot and individual tree level when spruce were surrounded by more deciduous trees, surrounded by dead trees that had been removed from the forest, and spruces located at the north and east slopes (315°–135° of aspect, > 2° slope). Soil wetness, solar radiation, and remaining standing dead trees in the surrounding did not significantly impact the damage level in the microenvironment of the study area. The GLM risk model yielded an overall accuracy of 0.69 in predicting individual trees being infested or healthy. Our efforts to investigate the risk factors provide a context for wall-to-wall mapping in-stand infestation risks, using remote sensing-based data.
期刊介绍:
The European Journal of Forest Research focuses on publishing innovative results of empirical or model-oriented studies which contribute to the development of broad principles underlying forest ecosystems, their functions and services.
Papers which exclusively report methods, models, techniques or case studies are beyond the scope of the journal, while papers on studies at the molecular or cellular level will be considered where they address the relevance of their results to the understanding of ecosystem structure and function. Papers relating to forest operations and forest engineering will be considered if they are tailored within a forest ecosystem context.