Analysis of invasive insects: links to climate change.

Abstract

Abstract Climate change is expected to alter the geographic distribution and abundance of many species, to increase the invasion of new areas by exotic species and, in some cases, to lead to species extinction. This chapter reviews some of the links between invasive insects and climate change. The effects of climate change on insect pest populations can be direct, through impacts on their physiology and behaviour, or indirect, through biotic interactions (i.e. bottom-up and top-down effects). Anthropogenic climate and global change is expected to be a major driver in the introduction, establishment, distribution, impact and changes in the efficacy of mitigation strategies for invasive species. To address these problems, we must be able to predict climate change impacts on species distribution and abundance. Commonly used ecological niche model ling approaches have implicit assumptions about the biology of the target species and attempt to characterize the ecological niche using aggregate weather and other factors in the area of recorded distribution. More holistic physiologically based demographic modelling approaches explicitly describe the biological and physiological responses of species to weather and the species they interact with on fine temporal and spatial scales. The geographic distribution and relative abundance of four invasive insect pests are reviewed under observed and +2°C weather scenarios across the USA and Mexico: the tropical New World screw worm, the pink bollworm, the Mediterranean fruit fly (i.e. medfly) and the olive fly. The distribution of the olive fly is examined across the Mediterranean basin to illustrate the transferability of the model to analyses of new regions and climate change scenarios.