Music professor receives patent to help fight bark beetles ravaging Western forests

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://news.ucsc.edu/2017/02/bark-beetles-dunn.html

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Music professor receives patent to help fight bark beetles ravaging Western forests[/font]

February 09, 2017
By Scott Rappaport

[font size=3]UC Santa Cruz music professor David Dunn has joined forces with two forest scientists from Northern Arizona University to combat an insect infestation that is killing millions of trees throughout the West.

They are applying the results of nearly a decade of acoustic research in an unconventional collaborative effort to stop bark beetles from tunneling through the living tissue of weakened, drought-stressed pine trees.

…

Dunn said that he and his colleagues at Northern Arizona University—Richard Hofstetter and Reagan McGuire--hope to produce a range of products as a result of their patent to combat bark beetles, as well as other insects related to them.

He added that scaling up the device to be effective in saving large forests might be possible through the use of local wireless or FM broadcast to protect select areas of forest, depending on how cheaply they can produce an effective system that can be applied to individual trees.

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[mike_c]

1. interesting, but of limited utility....

This approach suffers from the same scaling issues that have long plagued Dendroctonus anti-aggregation pheromone control measures-- while sometimes useful for preventing attacks against individual trees, they are prohibitively expensive and inefficient at the landscape scales where the beetles have their greatest impact. Dendroctonus bark beetles have a built in pheromone repellent system that they use to limit the number of attacks upon individual trees in order to avoid over exploiting single host resources. In principle, releasing those anti-aggregation pheromones from dispensers hung on trees should deter beetle attacks, and in practice it often does-- but the attacks simply divert to unprotected trees nearby. Scaling that system up to landscape scales is just too laborious and expensive to be practical, so it tends to be used only to protect individual, high value trees, such as ornamental conifers.

This would suffer from that same problem-- someone needs to place and maintain the signal transducing receivers, amplifiers, and speakers attached to each protected tree, as well as maintaining the broadcast system, to say nothing about how to power such a distributed system. It's a neat, novel idea, but I don't think it's very practical except for deterring attacks from individual, isolated high value trees.

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. That was my reaction as well

The question I guess you have to ask is how high a value do you place on the forest?

As a simple thought experiment, let’s say you value a forest highly enough to replant all of the trees that would need to be done individually. Right? What do you do with the stands of dead trees?

How much would it cost to replant a forest?

If I recall correctly protecting the trees using artificial pheromones requires periodic reapplication. What periodic maintenance would need to be done in this scenario? (Could the electronics be solar powered?)