Strategies and Barriers to Reconcile Pest Management with Insect Conservation in Temperate and Boreal Forests

Purpose of Review

To describe how general prescriptions to protect temperate and boreal forests against pests have been affecting the conservation of insect diversity, (2) to identify potential conflicts between biodiversity conservation actions and pest control, and (3) to provide future directions to reconcile forest pest management with insect conservation.

Recent Findings

Despite dealing with the same habitats and organisms, forest pest management and insect conservation have been separate disciplines, often pursuing conflicting goals. However, there is a large intersection between the two, as interventions to control pests can have repercussions on biodiversity and vice versa. In several regions, forest pest management is shifting from reactive measures to contain on-going outbreaks to proactive strategies to create forest landscapes that are more resistant and resilient against pests in the long-term. These developments suggest a possible convergence between pest management and insect conservation objectives.

Summary

Several reactive measures adopted to control pests can cause negative impacts on non-target insects, although effects are sometimes localized and often context-dependent. Following ecological, economic, and social considerations, pest management has been evolving towards diversifying forests across multiple spatial scales to reduce the severity of outbreaks and the risk of damage. Such strategies concur with multiple conservation goals to increase insect diversity across intensive forest landscapes. Insect conservation has traditionally targeted saproxylic organisms, neglecting the conservation of other insect guilds and seldom assessing side effects on pests. Despite some important knowledge gaps, we propose complementary approaches to combine multiple diversification strategies at the landscape scale to reconcile pest management with insect conservation.