Insect pests on conifers in Eastern Canadian forests are moving north

The spruce budworm, the main defoliator of conifer trees in Eastern North American boreal forests, is spreading northwards, and climatic factors seem to trigger and synchronize major outbreaks. These results are revealed in a recent reconstruction of the outbreak history of this species in Quebec during the last century, based on a dendroecological approach, i.e. … Read more

A Revolutionary Paleoindicator: Lepidoptera Scales

Moth scales, preserved in the mud of a coniferous forest lake, have been used to identify outbreaks of these insects over the past 10,000 years. This groundbreaking new technique, reported in the open-access journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, can tell us more about the frequency and intensity of past and future insect epidemics, their impact on the … Read more

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