Victims or perpetrators: contribution and response of insects to forest diebacks and declines
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LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Victims or perpetrators: contribution and response of insects to forest diebacks and declines Aurélien Sallé 1 & Christophe Bouget 2 Received: 27 July 2020 / Accepted: 7 September 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract & Key message Unprecedented forest declines and diebacks are expected worldwide in response to global change. Insects can trigger or contribute to these disturbances, which can in turn have either beneficial or detrimental retroactive cascading effects on insect communities. However, we are still unsure of the effects that pests will have on these disturbances in the future, and new biodiversity and pest management strategies still need to be put into place. Several recent contributions to Annals of Forest Science address these issues.
Forest ecosystems worldwide are currently facing increasing amounts of biotic and abiotic environmental stress, which severely challenges both their acclimation and adaptation capacities (Allen et al. 2010; Carnicer et al. 2011). As a result, extended forest diebacks, or declines, are becoming escalating global phenomena (Allen et al. 2010). The two terms have been used interchangeably (Ciesla and Donaubauer 1994), but it seems that “decline” more generally refers to multifactorial and progressive loss of tree vigor (Sinclair 1967; Manion 1981; Ciesla and Donaubauer 1994), while “dieback” refers to rapid tree mortality, driven by a major biotic or abiotic agent, such as the ash dieback (Pautasso et al. 2013). Insects are key components of forest biota. From a functional standpoint, they play major roles in several forest ecosystem processes, such as wood decomposition due to the Handling Editor: Erwin Dreyer Contributions of the co-authors All co-authors contributed to the text and approved its final version. This article is part of the Topical Collection on Entomological issues during forest diebacks * Aurélien Sallé [email protected] Christophe Bouget [email protected] 1
Laboratoire de Biologie des Ligneux et des Grandes Cultures, INRAE, Université d’Orléans, 45067 Orléans, France
2
INRAE, UR EFNO, Domaine des Barres, Nogent-sur-Vernisson, France
numerous saproxylic species (Grove 2002), and in trophic webs as key prey, predators, and herbivores (Yang and Gratton 2014). In addition to their animal biomass, they also make a major contribution to the tremendous biodiversity found in forests (Stork 2018). Within the frame of global change, forest insect populations are currently undergoing major shifts in their geographical range and population dynamics. In this context, forest insects can act as major drivers of diebacks or as inciting factors of declines (e.g., Thomas et al. 2002; Biedermann et al. 2019). Bark and wood boring species can also take advantage of the weakening of trees and act as contributing factors of declines (Sallé et al. 2014). Both dieback and decline dramatically alter the organization and functioning of forest ecosystems (e.g., Štursová et al. 2014; Hoven et al. 2020), and can consequently have cascad
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