A comprehensive approach to monitoring in management systems for forest pests

Although management of forest pests has advanced rapidly over the past decade in many countries where intensive forestry is practiced, the development of monitoring systems — or, more broadly, the information base — required to support newly-emerging programs is generally lagging. A more comprehensive approach to monitoring, which includes improved accounting of pest occurrence and damage through forest inventories and reliable indices of pest-related hazard and risk, is needed to augment customary procedures of surveillance and evaluation. Also, optimization of pest management strategies requires a better accounting of the interactive effects of destructive insects and diseases and, thus, monitoring of pest complexes as they occur, rather than uncoordinated monitoring of individual pests. Full realization of the potential benefits of forest pest management depends on replacing the present-day fragmented approach to monitoring with a broader-based information system directed to the prime decision-maker, the forest resource manager.