Abstract
• Maintenance and restoration of forest ecosystems will be key to achieving necessary carbon sequestration goals, protecting biodiversity, and supporting healthy economies and societies. • Forest ecosystems are increasingly threatened by non-native forest insects and phytopathogens. • A portion of these pests are able to overcome prevention and containment efforts and become established in naive ecosystems. • Once established these pests pose a long-term large-scale threat to forest ecosystems, which current policy and response frameworks are poorly equipped to address. • We propose the creation of a federal Center for Forest Pest Control and Prevention to implement end-to-end responses to forest pest invasions using an ecologically-informed framework that fully integrates host tree resistance development and deployment.
Highlights
Forests provide ecosystem services necessary for human welfare and survival, such as oxygen production, moderation of extreme weather, biodiversity maintenance, flood control, air and water purification, as well as timber and fiber used in construction and other industries
In the US, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) of the Department of Homeland Security, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), housed in the US Department of Health and Human Services, are always ready for top level coordinated responses in cases of events like earthquakes and hurricanes, or human disease invasions. No such structure exists for forest pathogens and insect pests (PIPs) invasion events, despite the fact that, combined with all other biological invasions worldwide, they cost more every year than all other natural disasters combined (Ricciardi et al, 2011)
To correct the poor response coordination with forest PIP invasions, we strongly advocate for a radical change in approach, based on a highly proactive, highly integrated framework of action: The USDA Centers for Forest Pest Control and Prevention (CFPCPs) (Figure 2)
Summary
Forests provide ecosystem services necessary for human welfare and survival, such as oxygen production, moderation of extreme weather, biodiversity maintenance, flood control, air and water purification, as well as timber and fiber used in construction and other industries. In the US, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) of the Department of Homeland Security, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), housed in the US Department of Health and Human Services, are always ready for top level coordinated responses in cases of events like earthquakes and hurricanes, or human disease invasions No such structure exists for forest PIP invasion events, despite the fact that, combined with all other biological invasions worldwide, they cost more every year than all other natural disasters combined (Ricciardi et al, 2011). To correct the poor response coordination with forest PIP invasions, we strongly advocate for a radical change in approach, based on a highly proactive, highly integrated framework of action: The USDA Centers for Forest Pest Control and Prevention (CFPCPs) (Figure 2) This concept has been endorsed by a wide range of leading forest health professionals both nationally and internationally Establish regional experimental tree improvement farms and laboratories modeled on some of the best existing examples of sustained programs for host resistance selection and breeding, e.g., the USFS Dorena Genetic Resource Center in Cottage Grove, Oregon and the Resistance Screening Center in Asheville, North Carolina
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