# Climate change alters diffusion of forest pest: A model study

## TL;DR

This study models how climate change influences the spatial spread of forest pests, revealing earlier outbreaks and pattern variations under different future climate scenarios.

## Contribution

Introduces a spatial population dynamics model linking climate factors to pest spread, validated with real data and applied to future climate scenarios.

## Key findings

- Climate change accelerates pest outbreak timing.
- Spatio-temporal spread patterns depend on initial infection source.
- Model replicates historical pest spread patterns.

## Abstract

Population dynamics with spatial information is applied to understand the spread of pests. We introduce a model describing how pests spread in discrete space. The number of pest descendants at each site is controlled by local information such as temperature, precipitation, and the density of pine trees. Our simulation leads to a pest spreading pattern comparable to the real data for pine needle gall midge in the past. We also simulate the model in two different climate conditions based on two different representative concentration pathways scenarios for the future. We observe that after an initial stage of a slow spread of pests, a sudden change in the spreading speed occurs, which is soon followed by a large-scale outbreak. We found that a future climate change causes the outbreak point to occur earlier and that the detailed spatio-temporal pattern of the spread depends on the source position from which the initial pest infection starts.