Paris. As a result of global warming, bark beetles are destroying the trees further north in Finland, endangering boreal forests, as precious to the planet as the Amazon.
These small brown insects attack the common spruce, one of the most common species in Finland, slowly destroying entire forests.
The scolitines devour everything that surrounds the coniferous trees and end up killing them by preventing water and nutrients from the soil from reaching the highest branches.
“These insects wreaked havoc throughout Central and Eastern Europe, especially starting in 2018,” explained Markus Melin, a scientist at the Finnish Institute of Natural Resources.
The risk of the epidemic spreading is “much higher now” due to global warming, he warned. “We have to accept it and adapt. Things are changing very fast.”
The threat is generally much higher in southern Finland, but in the hot summer of 2021 these xylophages wreaked havoc “far north” in the Kainuu region.
“It’s a well-known phenomenon: bark beetles are one of the species that benefit most from global warming to spread,” Melin said.
These beetles choose trees already weakened by hot summers and lack of water.
The increasingly warm climate also speeds up the life cycle of these beetles. “Their mortality rate is going down and they are reproducing much faster,” Melin added.
Although at first they choose the weakest trees, once they are very numerous, they attack the healthy ones.
If the forest guards do not react in time by removing the weaker trees, “suddenly the scolitines, being very numerous, can attack the healthy specimens, accelerating the cycle of destruction,” concluded Melin.
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