BDN interviews Wagner about coming spruce budworm infestation
Robert Wagner, the Henry W. Saunders Distinguished Professor in Forestry at the University of Maine and director of the Cooperative Forestry Research Unit, spoke with the Bangor Daily News for an article about Maine’s next anticipated spruce budworm outbreak. During the last infestation from 1970 until 1985, the Maine Forest Service estimates the insect killed between 20 million and 25 million cords of fir and spruce worth hundreds of millions of dollars. A similar outbreak in Maine today would have an economic impact of $794 million per year, according to the Maine Spruce Budworm Task Force, a collaboration of UMaine, the Maine Forest Service and Maine Forest Products Council. Currently, more than 15 million acres of Quebec and New Brunswick woodlands have been killed by spruce budworm, Wagner said. It takes several years for an infestation to lead to defoliation, but that’s beginning to take place in parts of Atlantic Canada, according to the article. Wagner and others on the task force are planning for the inevitable return of the spruce budworm, which could happen in two to eight years, and trying to ensure that Maine is more prepared than it was during the last population explosion, the article states. WVII (Channel 7) also interviewed Wagner for a report on spruce budworm.