Trait‐mediated responses of caterpillar communities to spongy moth outbreaks and subsequent tebufenozide treatments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Outbreaks of the spongy moth Lymantria dispar can have devastating impacts on forest resources and ecosystems. Lepidoptera-specific insecticides, such as Bacillus thuringiensis var. kurstaki (BTK) and tebufenozide, are often deployed to prevent heavy defoliation of the forest canopy. While it has been suggested that using BTK poses less risk to non-target Lepidoptera than leaving an outbreak untreated, in situ testing of this assumption has been impeded by methodological challenges. The trade-offs between insecticide use and outbreaks have yet to be addressed for tebufenozide, which is believed to have stronger side effects than BTK. We investigated the short-term trade-offs between tebufenozide treatments and no-action strategies for the non-target herbivore community in forest canopies. Over 3 years, Lepidoptera and Symphyta larvae were sampled by canopy fogging in 48 oak stands in southeast Germany during and after a spongy moth outbreak. Half of the sites were treated with tebufenozide and changes in canopy cover were monitored. We contrasted the impacts of tebufenozide and defoliator outbreaks on the abundance, diversity, and functional structure of chewing herbivore communities. Tebufenozide treatments strongly reduced Lepidoptera up to 6 weeks after spraying. Populations gradually converged back to control levels after 2 years. Shelter-building species dominated caterpillar assemblages in treated plots in the post-spray weeks, while flight-dimorphic species were slow to recover and remained underrepresented in treated stands 2 years post-treatment. Spongy moth outbreaks had minor effects on leaf chewer communities. Summer Lepidoptera decreased only when severe defoliation occurred, whereas Symphyta declined 1 year after defoliation. Polyphagous species with only partial host plant overlap with the spongy moth were absent from heavily defoliated sites, suggesting greater sensitivity of generalists to defoliation-induced plant responses. These results demonstrate that both tebufenozide treatments and spongy moth outbreaks alter canopy herbivore communities. Tebufenozide had a stronger and longer lasting impact, but it was restricted to Lepidoptera, whereas the outbreak affected both Lepidoptera and Symphyta. These results are tied to the fact that only half of the outbreak sites experienced severe defoliation. This highlights the limited accuracy of current defoliation forecast methods, which are used as the basis for the decision to spray insecticides.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".