Management

Pest management should be a part of the overall management plan for a forest. The need for pest control can usually be minimized through wise, long-term, forestry practices that promote healthy and vigorous trees. The control methods chosen will depend on the kind and amount of control necessary, the costs, and the benefits within legal, environmental, and other constraints.

This section discusses a management “roadmap,” which includes planning, prevention, direct and indirect management techniques.

IPM Model

The most important principle of pest control is to use a control method only when it will prevent the pest from causing more damage than is reasonable to accept. Even though a pest is present, it may not be necessary to control it. Both economics and ecology affect the decision to control or not. Exceptions are newly introduced non-native invasive pests for which adequate data on potential spread and impact are unavailable.

There are various management strategies and tactics that are available with varying results. For example, when dealing with bark beetles one option is to do nothing. If we take this approach, we can expect history to be repeated: we can expect periodic outbreaks as a result of population fluctuations, and we can expect that the amount of pine mortality in our forests will reflect past trends. However, with increases in acreage of host type, we might predict proportional increases in bark beetle activity and tree mortality.

Integrated pest management (IPM), the concurrent or consecutive use of a variety of tools or practices to control pests, is the overall process preferred by State and Federal agencies. Developing and implementing IPM for a particular pest is a complex process that requires considerable research. A systems model of IPM developed by Waters and Ewing (1974) indicates the complexity of developing an IPM system for the southern pine beetle.