Urban Forest Pest Detection
From Bugwoodwiki
Enhancing Exotic Pest Detection in Urban Areas with IPED
Community tree inventories are a valuable starting point for urban tree management. The IPED initiative is developing a protocol to assist communities and municipal foresters with detecting insect and disease infestations as part of these inventories. Benefits of an enhanced inventory include:
- increasing awareness of street tree conditions and potential problems
- improving opportunities to treat problems while they are still manageable
- increasing the opportunity for early detection of exotic pest problems.
The basis of this pilot project is to take advantage of community tree inventories and ‘piggyback’ pest detection onto the inventory process. Communities conduct street tree inventories as part of an on-going urban and community program effort to encourage better management of the urban forest. In large communities these inventories are often conducted by professionals while in smaller communities volunteers conduct or assist in the inventory.
Key Issues Addressed by Urban Forest Pest Detection
Greater pest awareness: As with forest and timber management, better awareness of tree pest and disease problems improve care and management programs. Municipal foresters need to be aware of signs and symptoms that indicate potential tree health issues.
Opportunities for remedial or preventative actions: Detecting signs and symptoms of tree pest problems during inventory allows the municipal forester to develop remedial or preventative actions to improve urban forest health and save trees.
Exotic pest detection: Since most exotic pests are first introduced to urban areas (Asian long-horned beetle, emerald ash borer, and gypsy moth, for example) exotic pest detection incorporated into street tree inventories affords an opportunity to expand detection capabilities. Street tree inventories that incorporate exotic pest detection provide a geographically widespread (numerous communities) and locally intensive (many trees per city) exotic pest detection method that may prove to be more useful than traditional grid-based detection systems used by most regulatory agencies. Using the IPED module, urban areas can become a first line of exotic pest detection.
A Comprehensive Approach
The method and protocols outlined here, as part of the IPED project, take an urban forest manager through the steps to discover, evaluate, report, and react to potentially harmful insect pests and diseases of the urban forest The project, in total, consists of:
- Arriving at an acceptable pest detection method
- Linking pest detection to an inventory method
- Training
- Enabling a community to assess its own pest conditions
- Providing resources for a community to ‘self-diagnose’
- Providing resources for exotic pest detection and confirmation
- Establishing diagnostic contacts
- Enabling pest specialist’s access to regional community tree inventories to search for anomalies that may indicate the presence of a new exotic
