Research: Is Maine prepared for the next spruce budworm outbreak?
Transcript
Robert Wagner:
We’re standing in a mixed forest, but it’s dominated right here by balsam fir. It’s hard for me to know exactly how old they are, but just judging them to be probably in the 30-year range, or so.
These balsam fir will be the most affected by the budworm if it was to build up to critical populations in a stand like this.
The spruce budworm is a member of Lepidoptera, and it is a moth, essentially that has its life cycle in the main spruce-fir forest and throughout the Canadian forest. Every 30 to 60 years in this part of its range, it will undergo a large outbreak.
The budworm essentially defoliates the trees over a period of years. After about three to five years of this kind of defoliation, the trees begin to die.
The one from 1970 to ’85, which many foresters my age and older remember very well, basically defoliated millions of acres of northern Maine. There was a lot of mature spruce and fir at that point. There was a lot of dependence on the spruce and fir for paper making and for solid wood products, lumber, et cetera.
It came on very quickly in 1970 and went through repeated periods of defoliation and killing the forests. Something in the neighborhood of 20 to 25 million cords of wood were killed.
The outbreak that has just started here, actually started about 2005 or 2006, and it has grown in Quebec really quite quickly from 2005, ’06 on to today. To give you a sense of how quickly it’s growing, last year the outbreak footprint of dead and dying spruce and fir was about 10 million acres. This year, Quebec government just released the report and it’s grown by 50 percent to 15 million acres.
To just give you a sense of the size of that, the entire state of Maine forest is 17 million acres in size. The outbreak on the north shore is equal to the area of Maine’s forest. It is expanding quite quickly. The moths are moving south.
Charlene Donahue:
This is an end-of-the-season check, when we come in, look and see if any budworm have been flying in this area. We’ve got budworm.
Robert Wagner:
The way that we’ve been tracking over time are using pheromone traps, and the trap counts over the past four, five years have just been steadily increasing.
Charlene Donahue:
The numbers are doubling every year right now. Then, at some point, there’s an exponential explosion of the moths.
Robert Wagner:
I think for the average person in Maine to prepare for the outbreak is just to be aware that it’s going to happen. It’s unclear at this point about how severe it might be.
We think there may be a role as the outbreak proceeds to use citizen science, to use people to help put out moth traps, to do other kinds of reporting and to work closely with the landowners who are having to deal with this outbreak, to be supportive of the efforts that they might have going.
Charlene Donahue:
We’re in competition with the budworm, and that’s where the problem lies. If people are looking to harvest the trees, then they need to be paying attention to what’s happening on their property.