With the coming of summer, the UF Forest Entomology Lab has two big things to look forward to. An increase in observable beetle activity, and the opportunity to step away from the classroom and lab to find out what’s happening in the field.
PhD candidate A. Simon Ernstsons will spend three months organizing field work in China that is critical to the future of the lab and for establishing a better way of preventing destructive outbreaks of forest pests. Ernstsons will be spearheading the lab’s new sentinel garden project aimed at identifying future pests before they even arrive in the US.
Ernstsons must find his way around several regions of rural China, obtain hundreds of trees of American commodity species that are rare in Asia, transport them to remote planting sites, then monitor them for damage by local insects. Some of the trees will be deliberately stressed to simulate the effects of flooding and drought.
“Then we have a really important data point where we know something potentially dangerous is in a certain area,” Ernstsons says. “We can then feed back that information back to USDA [division of Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service] and it can influence things like bio-security measures, phytosanitary control, that sort of thing.”
Sentinel gardens are a relatively new concept already being explored between France and China by Dr. Alain Roques and his team at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research. There is currently no equivalent involving the United States, though botanical gardens may notify one another when they notice a new pest on an exotic tree.
Organizing an experiment like this is not an easy task. Layers of government bureaucracy, cultural differences, and language barriers make it difficult to design and monitor an experiment involving hundreds of trees that are scarce in China. Fortunately, Ernstsons (who speaks five languages, including Mandarin), has experience with a small-scale pilot project for the lab last summer.
“Imagine trying to arrange two hundred trees to be delivered to a village on the side of a mountain in the middle of rural China, how would you go about doing that and how difficult do you think would that be?” Ernstsons asks. “That’s my experience. Going out and doing those kinds of things with local scientific collaborators, but also collaborators for logistics, things like sourcing and buying the trees.”
The work is funded by grants from USDA’s APHIS through the Plant Protection Act, section 7721.
As invasive beetles including the emerald ashborer and the Asian long-horned beetle continue to destroy American trees, could those infestations have been prevented by sentinel gardens? Ernstsons believes so.
“We certainly could have known well in advance and tried to put measures in place. Once it’s arrived we’ve seen again and again that ninety nine percent of the time it’s a losing battle.”