Tracking insect outbreaks: a case study of community-assisted moth monitoring using sex pheromone traps

Abstract

Insect outbreaks can cover vast geographic areas making it onerous to cost-effectively monitor populations to address management or ecological questions. Community science (or citizen science), which entails engaging the public to assist with data collection, provides a possible solution to this challenge for the spruce budworm ( Choristoneura fumiferana Clemens), a major defoliating pest in North America. Here, we lay out the Budworm Tracker Program, a contributory community science program developed to help monitor spruce budworm moths throughout eastern Canada. The program outsources free pheromone trap kits to volunteers who periodically check and collect moths from their traps throughout the budworm flight period, then return them in a prepaid envelope to the organizers. Over three years, the program engaged an average of 216–375 volunteers and yielded a data return rate of 68%–89%, for a total of 16 311–54 525 moths per year. Volunteer retention among years was 71%–89%. Data from this program offer compelling evidence for the range of long-distance moth dispersal. Although our program was designed for spruce budworm, this template could easily be adapted for forestry, urban forestry, and agricultural systems to monitor any of the numerous organisms for which there is an established trapping method.

The Use of UAS to Release the Egg ParasitoidTrichogrammaspp. (Hymenoptera: Trichogrammatidae) Against an Agricultural and a Forest Pest in Canada

“…To make sure that the first Trichogramma release was carried out at the beginning of the moth flight periods, owners or managers of all of our sites were participating in the Budworm Tracker citizen science program trapping spruce budworm moths using pheromone traps ( Carleton et al 2020 ). The first release was conducted 2–3 d after the first capture and the second release 1 wk after the first one ( Table 3 ).…”

A new generation of sensors and monitoring tools to support climate-smart forestry practices

“…Besides, citizen science benefits research by making science open and transparent. Instead of hiding behind academic walls and difficult to access scientific journals than can perpetuate distrust of science (Cooper 2016), it creates stronger public engagement and greater interest and knowledge transfer (Carleton et al 2020). Challenges regarding citizen science include quality, equity, inclusion, and governance (Brovelli et al 2020) and, increasingly, legal issues relating to privacy, ethics and licensing (Mooney et al 2019).…”

“…Crucial elements in successful citizen science programs include sufficient training, and the type, scale and location of the study area under investigation. For the first aspect, studies suggest that, with adequate training and supervision, volunteers can undertake tasks such as the monitoring of pheromone traps and mail samples (Carleton et al 2020) or collecting and recording tree measurements data for carbon stock estimation (Harrison et al 2020) to ensure reliable results. As well as training, needs for calibration and instrumentation must also be considered.…”

“…For the second aspect, i.e. the scale of the planned project, unevenness of coverage in participatory projects is an acknowledged problem: the number of volunteers is invariably higher in urban areas than in remote areas (Carleton et al 2020). For this reason, for mountain or boreal forests, the availability of a local citizen science community may prove problematic and demand creative solutions.…”

Quantifying and predicting population connectivity of an outbreaking forest insect pest

“…In 2006, a new outbreak began on the north shore of the Saint Lawrence River in Quebec. Since then, the area affected has increased to > 13.5 million ha in Quebec (Ministère des Forêts de la Faune et des Parcs [MFFP] 2020 ) and is currently affecting other jurisdictions to the south (New Brunswick, Maine) and west (Ontario) with no signs of abating (Carleton et al 2020 ).…”