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Climate change and the incidence of a forest pest in Mediterranean ecosystems: can the North Atlantic Oscillation be used as a predictor?

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Abstract

Many forest pest species strongly depend on temperature in their population dynamics, so that rising temperatures worldwide as a consequence of climatic change are leading to increased frequencies and intensities of insect-pest outbreaks. In the Mediterranean area, the climatic conditions are strongly linked to the effects of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). The aim of this work is to analyze the dynamics of the pine processionary moth (Thaumetopoea pityocampa), a severe pest of Pinus species in the Circunmediterranean, throughout a region of southern Spain, in relation to NAO indices. We related the percentage of forest plots with high defoliation by pine processionary moth each year with NAO values for the present and the three previous winters, using generalized linear models with a binomial error distribution. The time series is 16-year long, and we performed analyses for the whole database and for the five main pine species separately. We found a consistent relationship between the response variable and the NAO index. The relationship is stronger with pine species living at medium-high altitudes, such as Aleppo (P. halepensis), black (P. nigra), and Scots (Pinus sylvestris) pine, which show the higher defoliation intensities up to 3 years after a negative NAO phase. The results highlight, for the first time, the usefulness of using global drivers in order to understand the dynamics of pest outbreaks at a regional scale, and they open the window to the development of NAO-based predictive models as an early-warning signal of severe pest outbreaks.

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Acknowledgements

The Dirección General de Gestión del Medio, Consejería de Medio Ambiente, Junta de Andalucía, provided the databases with which this work was made. Several anonymous reviewers provided helpful comments that improved the manuscript. This study was supported by projects PROPINOL (PN22/2008) and CONSOLIDER-MONTES (CSD2008-00040) from the Spanish Ministry of the Environment, and GESBOME (P06-RNM-1890) from Junta de Andalucía.

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  1. Grupo de Ecología Terrestre, Departamento de Ecología, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Granada, 18071, Granada, Spain

    José A. Hódar & Regino Zamora

  2. Área de Biodiversidad y Conservación, Departamento de Biología y Geología, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, c/ Tulipán s/n, 28933, Móstoles, Madrid, Spain

    Luis Cayuela

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  1. José A. Hódar
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Correspondence to José A. Hódar.

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Appendix S1

Results of the generalized linear models accounting for the effects of winter NAO values for the present and the three previous winters on the percentage of pine woodland stands affected by PPM for all species and for the main five pine species using the subset of woodlands stands that had the whole time series between 1994 and 2009. Only the variables that constitute the best model fit, based on the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC), are shown. (DOC 36 kb)

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Hódar, J.A., Zamora, R. & Cayuela, L. Climate change and the incidence of a forest pest in Mediterranean ecosystems: can the North Atlantic Oscillation be used as a predictor?. Climatic Change 113, 699–711 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-011-0371-7

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