From balsam fir with love: community scientists trap and ship forest pest to help track outbreaks

Insect pest outbreaks can cover vast geographic areas making it onerous and costly to monitor their populations.

Community science — or citizen science — which entails engaging the public to assist with data collection, provides a possible solution to this challenge.

We lay out the Budworm Tracker Program, a community science initiative developed to help monitor spruce budworm moths throughout eastern Canada.

Spruce budworm is the major needle-eating pest of spruce and balsam fir in North America and can kill trees over massive areas if left unchecked.

Read this open access paper on the FACETS website.

The program sends “start-up kits” free-of-charge to volunteers who assemble the pheromone traps and hang them in trees in their backyard. Traps are checked periodically throughout the moth flight period and captured moths are collected and stored in the volunteer’s freezer. After the flight period ends, moths are returned to the program organizers in a pre-paid envelope for counting and processing.

During the first three years of the program (2015–2017) volunteers throughout eastern Canada hung over 1000 traps, logged over 13,000 sampling days, and collected nearly 100,000 moths.

Although the Budworm Tracker Program was designed for spruce budworm, our approach could easily be adapted for forestry, urban forestry, and agricultural systems to monitor any of the numerous organisms for which there is an established trapping method.

Read the paper — Tracking insect outbreaks: a case study of community-assisted moth monitoring using sex pheromone traps by R. Drew Carleton, Emily Owens, Holly Blaquière, Stéphane Bourassa, Joseph J. Bowden, Jean-Noël Candau, Ian DeMerchant, Sara Edwards, Allyson Heustis, Patrick M.A. James, Alison M. Kanoti, Chris J.K. MacQuarrie, Véronique Martel, Eric R.D. Moise, Deepa S. Pureswaran, Evan Shanks and Rob C. Johns.