holistic management of emerging forest pests and diseases
Running from 2018 until 2022, HOMED was dedicated to developing a full panel of scientific knowledge and practical solutions for the management of emerging native and non-native pests and pathogens (PnPs) threatening European forests. In order to share its results and further improve the management of emerging forest pests and pathogens, HOMED recently published a special issue in the open-access journal NeoBiota. The issue is called "Conceptual and technical innovations to better...
A recent ‘Results in Brief’ published by the Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS) calls attention to HOMED’s technical innovations which can make European forests more resistant to invasive species. With nearly half a year having passed since HOMED’s ending, we are happy to see its results are still making waves! Recognising the need for a more holistic and structured approach to addressing the issue of invasive species, HOMED improved...
Group living (i.e., gregariousness) is a widespread trait among animals, which is associated with a female depositing her eggs in an egg mass. Insect species with such lifestyles appear more prone to outbreaks than species with a solitary lifestyle. In his article from 1987, Hanski takes the life history perspective of gregariousness into a population perspective. The article concludes that species with a gregarious lifestyle show greater spatiotemporal variability in survival. To obtain...
The pinewood nematode (PWN) Bursaphelenchus xylophilus (Steiner and Buhrer) is among the most serious threats to coniferous forests in Europe, known for causing substantial tree mortality when established. It is an invasive species in European pine forests, being vectored by the longhorn beetle Monochamus galloprovincialis. It is very difficult to control and one potential approach to slowing its spread is the presence of less preferred host trees that may disrupt the insect vector dispersal....
A recently-published HOMED paper, Urban tree isolation affects the abundance of its pests and their natural enemies, sets out to discover how urban tree spatial arrangements influence pest abundance and top-down regulation by natural enemies. Cities are home to the majority of the Earth's population and concentrate large movement of goods, making urban trees especially susceptible to insect herbivory. Aside from that, urban trees are essential for human well-being as they provide...
This press release has been published in EurekAlert! and in AlphaGalileo. After four years of research collaboration, the H2020 project HOMED successfully ended with a full panel of scientific knowledge and practical solutions. In the last decades, a growing number of invasive non-native pests and pathogens (PnPs) have been causing dramatic losses to European trees and forests. To mitigate these risks, the concluding Horizon 2020 project HOMED (Holistic management...
Since 2018, HOMED partners have been joining forces to better understand and manage forest pests and tree pathogens. And although four years may not seem like a lot, thanks to their prolific research collaboration, project partners were able to make the most out of them. Despite the fact that there still is a long road ahead of us when it comes to forest health, HOMED is proud to have left its mark, hopefully helping future researchers and practitioners. In that spirit, HOMED published a...
HOMED’s collection of practice abstracts published on the European Innovation Partnership for Agricultural Productivity and Sustainability (EIP-AGRI) platform keeps growing! After the previous two batches, the project has now published a third one containing seven new abstracts – some of which are available in French, Italian and Portuguese. What can you expect from these new additions? Recommendations on how to improve early detection efforts based on a study of the...
The HOMED final meeting took place between 12 and 14 September 2022 in Lisbon, Portugal, back to back with the project’s attendance at IUFRO All-Division 7 2022 Conference the week before. Representatives of all partner institutions gathered to mark the end of a four-year research collaboration, including HOMED experts from the USA, Australia, New Zealand, China and South Africa. HOMED partners presented their results on the key research topics of the management of emerging and...
Last week, 6-9 September 2022, the International Union of Forest Research Organizations all Division 7 (Forest Health, Pathology and Entomology) 2022 conference took place in Lisbon, Portugal. Its planning began all the way back in 2019 at the last IUFRO congress in Brazil. With anticipation building up for 3 years, forest health researchers were more than happy to meet in person and discuss their latest research. Among them, of course, were many HOMED members eager to share their outcomes so...
HOMED partners produced a new video showing stakeholders how to employ two simple yet effective tools for the early detection of tree pests in high-risk sites. Since its beginning back in 2018, the project has been developing tools for the full pathway of pests and pathogens invasions and rapid early detection devices are a crucial part of this work, as they allow stakeholders to stop an invasion before it even starts. In this context, the HOMED project has been working on two devices which...
The HOMED project produced a new video demonstrating its latest tools for prevention and detection of tree pathogens. These are valuable additions to the project’s full panel of scientific knowledge and practical solutions and were developed in order to improve early warning and rapid response, thus minimising the impact of biological invasions of tree pathogens. The new tools are of particular interest to nurseries, plant health authorities, plant importers, and scientific...
September 2022 promises to be an exciting month for HOMED. Project partners will gather in Lisbon, Portugal, in order to attend not one, but two important forest health events. From 6 to 9 September 2022, the IUFRO all Division 7 (Forest Health, Pathology and Entomology) 2022 conference will take place. It will be hosted by the Forest Research Centre (CEF) of the School of Agriculture (ISA), University of Lisbon, in collaboration with Abreu Events. The conference will provide an...
A new HOMED video demonstrates how to sample spores of fungal pathogens using the ROTTRAP 52 device. Besides sampling spores of fungal pathogens, this system, further developed by HOMED partner Milon Dvorak (Mendel University in Brno), can also be used for sampling of other airborne particles, such as pollen, mites, parts of insects or algae. The ROTTRAP 52 is a valuable addition to HOMED’s panel of practical solutions for the detection of emerging native and non-native pests and...
Last month, July 2022, entomologists from around the world gathered in Helsinki, Finland, to attend the XXVI International Congress of Entomology 2022: the northernmost location for the legendary congress dating back to 1910. Among the visitors, there were many HOMED researchers who were eager to share their latest results and learn from their colleagues’ work. The 6-day congress in Helsinki offered an outstanding, cutting-edge scientific programme. It covered over 150 symposia with...
HOMED partners from the University of Padua produced an enlightening video about how everyday materials can be used to monitor ambrosia beetle’ populations. The video – created by HOMED members Dr Fernanda Colombari and Prof Andrea Battisti – demonstrates how with no more than 5-6 components, you can construct inexpensive traps, which can have actual impact. In fact, during a citizen science experiment in the spring of 2021, these traps were set in schools throughout the...
On 29 June 2022, a panel of researchers, forest managers and plant health authority representatives gathered in Bayonne, France, to discuss the HOMED-developed tools and network for the early detection of tree pests. The workshop was organised by the IEFC, in collaboration with the INRAE, the UNIPD and the French Department of forest health. The Lazaret forest on the Adour river was purposefully chosen for the gathering, as it is located at the commercial port of Bayonne, which hosts many...
Proposal for Nature Restoration Law On June 22 2022, the European Commission adopted a momentous set of legislative proposals aiming to restore damaged ecosystems – from agricultural land and seas, to forests and urban environments. The proposal for a Nature Restoration Law comes as a response to the deep and prolonged degradation of ecosystems that has been documented in reports by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) as...