Invasive Pest and Invasive Host: Where Might Spotted-Wing Drosophila (Drosophila suzukii) and American Black Cherry (Prunus serotina) Cross Paths in Europe?

Abstract

Both spotted-wing drosophila (SWD, Drosophila suzukii) and American black cherry (ABC, Prunus serotina) are invasive species with major deleterious effects on forest ecosystems in Europe. ABC, a host of SWD, can sustain large populations of SWD, and SWD in turn can constrain the regeneration of its host. Here, we examined the range shifts of SWD, ABC, and their range overlap under future scenarios using range shift models. In the current–future scenarios, both SWD and ABC were predicted to undergo potential range expansions in Europe, suggesting that their invasion risks might increase in the future. Climate change might be the major driver of range shifts of both the pest and host, followed by land-use and host availability changes; therefore, mitigating future climate change might be key for controlling their future invasions in Europe. The relative contribution of climate and host availability to shaping the potential ranges of invasive species might not only vary with their feeding habitats (polyphagy/oligophagy) but also with the relative abundance of hosts among available host reservoirs. Range overlap under current and future scenarios was mainly observed in the UK, Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Eastern Europe; this area is of high and low priority for the control of SWD and ABC, respectively.

Future Climate Change and Anthropogenic Disturbance Promote the Invasions of the World’s Worst Invasive Insect Pests

“…We compiled a preliminary occurrence dataset including 226,544 records. For each IIP, we used the method suggested by Zhou et al (2024) [41] to remove occurrences with geographical co-ordinate uncertainty >5 km and spatially thinned the occurrences at an equal distance of 10 km. The final occurrence dataset contained 26,835 occurrence points, belonging to 15 subdatasets of the worst IIPs (Figure 1).…”

“…SSP585 is a pessimistic scenario in which an additional radiative forcing of 8.5 W/m 2 by the year 2100 could be allowed, representing the upper boundary of the range of the SSP scenarios [43,44]. Nineteen climatic predictors (eight for temperature and eleven for precipitation) had a 2.5 arc-min spatial resolution [41]. The monthly rainfall and temperature datasets with a spatial resolution of 2.5 arc-minutes from 1990-2020 were obtained from the Climate Research Division (CRU, www.crudata.uea.ac.uk, accessed on 6 March 2023).…”

“…The R package 4.3.0 Biovarcs by Fick & Hijmans (2017) [42] was used to calibrate 19 climate predictors under current conditions [42]. They corresponded to those from the Worldclim database [41]. The 19 climate predictors for the future scenarios in 2100 under the least (SSP126) and most (SSP585) climate change scenarios were obtained from Worldclim [42].…”