Dogs and drones join the battle of forests against the eight teeth beetle

It is smaller than your nails, but this hairy beetle is one of the biggest individual threats to UK forests.

The beetle of the bark was the scourge of Europe, killing millions of fir trees, yet the government believed that it might stop spreading to the UK by verifying the wooden products imported in the ports.

But this was not their favorite way – they were transferred to the wind directly over the English channel.

Now, UK government scientists were resisting, with an extraordinary arsenal including cut dogs, drones and nuclear waste models.

They claim that the United Kingdom has eliminated the beetle from risk areas in the east and southeast. But climate change can make the task more difficult in the future.

The bark beetle, or the IPS Typographus, is filled with its way through coniferous trees in Europe for decades, leaving behind a path of destruction.

The back beetles and nourish their young under the bark of tree trees in complex networks of overlapping tunnels called exhibitions.

When trees are injured by a few thousand beetles, they can overcome them, using resin to expel beetles.

But for the stressful tree, its natural defenses are reduced and the beetles begin to hit.

“The population can build up to the extent that they can overcome tree defenses – there are millions, billions of beetles,” said Dr. Max Blake, head of tree health in forest research in the UK government.

“There is a lot of the tree that you cannot deal with, especially when it is dry, they do not have a resin pressure to expel the exhibitions.”

Since the beetle has been held in Norway more than a decade ago, I managed to wipe 100 million cubic meters of spruce, According to Rothmastment research.

Since Sitka Spruce is the main tree used in wood in the UK, Dr. Blake and his colleagues have seen developments in continental Europe with some great anxiety.

Andrea Diol said in the forest research: “We have 725,000 hectares of spruce alone, if this beetle is allowed to obtain this, the destructive capabilities mean an enormous amount of this in danger,” Andrea Diol said in forest research. “We have estimated it – a partial evaluation of 2.9 billion pounds annually in Great Britain.”

There are more than 1,400 pests and diseases in the government’s health risk record, but IPS has been classified on “General Enemy No.”.

The number of these diseases was accelerating, according to Nick Phillips at the Woodland Trust.

“Mostly, the reason for this is global trade, we import wooden products and trees for cultivation, which sometimes bring” street “in terms of pests and disease,” he said.

Forest research was working with border monitoring for years to check these products for IPS, but in 2018, he discovered a shocking discovery in wood in Kent.

“We found the reproductive group that was there for a few years,” Mrs. Diol explained.

“Later on, we started to capture larger quantities of beetles in [our] The traps that seemed to indicate that they were praying by other means. She added that all the research that we have now conducted indicated that they were detonated from the continent on the wind.

The team knew that they should act quickly and spread a mixture of techniques that do not seem to be in a military operation.

Done -drones are sent to wipe hundreds of hectares from the forests, searching for signs of infection from the sky – with the continuation of the beetle, the upper umbrella of the tree can not be feed for nutrients and water, and begins to die.

But the next is the strenuous work of insect scientists who walk on foot to inspect the trees themselves.

Andrea Diol said: “They are looking for a needle in a straw pile, and they are sometimes looking for one beetle – to get the leading species before they are allowed to establish,” Andrea Diol said.

In one year, her team searched 4,500 hectares of spruce in the public estate – only shy of 7,000 football fields.

It is difficult to maintain such work that it takes physically, and the team was looking for some help from the natural world and technology alike.

When you find the leading bark beetles in the spruce tree a suitable host tree, they release viroms – chemical signals to attract beetles and create a colony.

But this strong smell, as well as the smell associated with insect stools – is what makes it ideal by Sniffer dogs.

Early trials have succeeded so far. Dogs are especially useful for examining large wood chimneys that may be difficult to examine visually.

The team also poses cameras on their errors, which are now able to scan and select the beetles daily in the actual time.

“We have [created] Our algorithm to identify insects. Dr. Blake said: “We have taken about 20,000 pictures of IPS, beetles and other debris, which were officially identified by insect scientists, and feed them in the model.”

Some traps can be in the previously difficult areas and have only been examined every week by insects working on the ground.

The result of this work means that the United Kingdom has been confirmed as the first country to clarify the IPS Typographus in its controlled areas, which are at risk of injury, and It covers the southeast and east of England.

Ms. Diol said: “What we do is to have a positive impact and it is very important that we continue to maintain this effort. If we leave our guard, we know that we are facing these risks of incursion on an annual basis.”

And those risks rise. Europe has seen an increase in IPS because it takes advantage of the trees tightened by the changing climate.

Europe suffers from more extreme rain in winter and more moderate temperatures, which means that there is less freezing, leaving the trees in water conditions.

This besides the drought summer, they are left with strained and exposed to falling in stormy weather, and this is the time when IPS can climb.

With more population in Europe, the risk of transporting IPS colonies increases to the United Kingdom.

The team works in Forest Research to predict accurately when these incursions occur.

“We have made modeling with colleagues at the University of Cambridge and the Met desk that adapted to a nuclear atmosphere scattering model with IPS,” explained by Dr. Blake. “So, [the model] It was originally used to consider nuclear repercussions and that the wind took it, instead, we use the model to look at the extent that IPS is far away. “

Nick Phillips in the Woodland Trusts strongly supports the government’s action, but it worries the loss of old forests – the oldest and most biologically rich in forests.

The commercial fir tree has long been planted next to these woods, and every time a beetle hosting tree is found, it must be removed and adjacent trees, sometimes.

“We really want the government to maintain as much trees as possible, especially those that are not affected, and then when trees are removed, land owners support to take steps to restore what is there,” he said. “So that they are granted, for example, to be able to restore forest sites.”

The government has increased forest financing in recent years, but this focuses on cultivating new trees.

“If we only have funding and support for the first few years of the tree’s life, but not for these 100 or a century -old forests, we will not be able to provide nature’s restoration and carbon seizure,” he said.

Additional reports Miho Tanaka