Assessing Pine Wilt Disease Risk Under a Climate Change Scenario in Northwestern Spain

Forest ecosystems are characterized by their structural complexity and biodiversity and trophic relationships within them commonly involve several levels. Functioning of these systems is likely to be perturbed in many ways if significant warming predicted eventually occurs. Among the interactions to be shifted by temperature increments in the Mediterranean region, these between forest pest and host trees are highly relevant to forest conservation and management, since perturbations may result in many cases in a reduced probability of tree or stand survival.

In this chapter, we defined a risk rating model to establish distinct risk levels for development of pine wilt disease in Castile and Leon Autonomous Community (North western of Spain, Fig. 1) and determined: first, current forest areas were these levels occurred and second, expected changes in risk areas if global warming raised main air temperature of July by 2°C. The potential introduction of the pine wood nematode poses a serious threat to many pine forest in Europe, thus, even though the study presented is within a regional scope, the procedure here developed would be of interest for application to most of the European regions were Monochamus galloprovinciallis and susceptible hosts occur.