Entomogenic Climate Change

TL;DR

This paper discusses how insect-driven deforestation, amplified by climate change, creates a feedback loop that accelerates global warming, highlighting the need for new detection and control strategies based on bioacoustic communication.

Contribution

It reveals the role of bioacoustic communication in insect infestations and proposes novel detection and control methods to address climate-related deforestation.

Findings

Bioacoustic communication influences infestation dynamics.

Insect populations accelerate deforestation under warming temperatures.

Potential for bioacoustic-based detection and control methods.

Abstract

Rapidly expanding insect populations, deforestation, and global climate change threaten to destabilize key planetary carbon pools, especially the Earth's forests which link the micro-ecology of insect infestation to climate. To the extent mean temperature increases, insect populations accelerate deforestation. This alters climate via the loss of active carbon sequestration by live trees and increased carbon release from decomposing dead trees. A positive feedback loop can emerge that is self-sustaining--no longer requiring independent climate-change drivers. Current research regimes and insect control strategies are insufficient at present to cope with the present regional scale of insect-caused deforestation, let alone its likely future global scale. Extensive field recordings demonstrate that bioacoustic communication plays a role in infestation dynamics and is likely to be a critical link in the feedback loop. These results open the way to novel detection and monitoring strategies and nontoxic control interventions.