Abstract
The oak lace bug (Corythucha arcuata, Say 1832) is a new invasive sap-sucking species in the European oak forests that was first recorded in Central Europe in 2013. It invaded the region from Southeastern Europe, spreads rapidly, and shows no signs of receding after establishment. In this study, focusing on the oak forests in the transboundary area of Hungary and Croatia, we applied two novel methods for detecting and assessing the impact of the oak lace bug (OLB) during the period 2000–2019 based on MODIS NDVI measured at 250 m spatial and 8-day temporal resolution. The first detection method is based purely on NDVI and has the potential to be used in near real-time detection. The second one, based on the residual Z-score of the NDVI models using daily meteorological and soil water content data as independent variables, aims at improved OLB damage assessment by decoupling the effects of the OLB from those caused by the environmental drivers. The presented detection methods had 61.1% to 93.8% agreement with the in situ data, with a better agreement in forests with high oak share. The overall share of the false-positive OLB detections for the strictest method of model residuals was 1.8%. The results confirmed a strong and year-to-year persistent NDVI decrease (down to -14.5% in pure oak forests) during the late summer which can be attributed to the OLB. The origin of the infestation in the study area was identified to be near a resting station on the major highway from Southeastern to Western Europe, corroborating the assumptions that the OLB spread was primarily facilitated by the transport system. The detected speed of the OLB radial spread in the first 3 years of infestation was under 6 km y-1, but since then it increased to above 50 km y-1.
Highlights
European forests are expected to play a major role in the EU’s climate change mitigation efforts of a 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emission by 2030 and achieving climate-neutrality by 2050 (COM, 2020a, 2020b)
It is important to note that at this point we still cannot claim that the detected Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) decrease of a pixel is only attributed to the oak lace bug (OLB) or if other biotic or abiotic factors significantly contributed to the decrease
The OLB causes a significant NDVI decrease in the late summer which can be used for detection of the infestation using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spec troradiometer (MODIS)
Summary
European forests are expected to play a major role in the EU’s climate change mitigation efforts of a 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emission by 2030 and achieving climate-neutrality by 2050 (COM, 2020a, 2020b). The oak lace bug (Corythucha arcuata, Say 1832 - Heteroptera: Tin gidae), native to North America (Barber, 2010), is a new invasive alien species in Europe, spreading rapidly and causing foliage damage pri marily of oak trees, potentially jeopardizing the long term health, pro ductivity and stability of natural oak forests Since it was first recorded in northern Italy in 2000 (Bernardinelli, 2000; Bernardinelli and Zan digiacomo, 2000), the oak lace bug (hereafter OLB) has spread to most of the countries in South-East and Central Europe (Fig. 1), mostly passively by the traffic and to a lesser extent by the wind (Csoka et al, 2013; Dobreva et al, 2013; Hrasovec et al, 2013; Tomescu et al, 2018; Sotirovski et al, 2019; Mertelík and Liska, 2020). In recent years the infestation has gained mo mentum (Simov et al, 2018; Csoka et al, 2020; Paulin et al, 2020), which might be promoted by the drier weather and delayed arrivals of winter in the region in the last years (Csepelenyi et al, 2017a)
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