9313026 Liebhold This award will support a cooperative research project between Dr. Andrew W. Liebhold, Northeastern Forest Experiment Station, U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service, Morgantown, West Virginia, and Dr. Naoto Kamata, Tohoku Research Center, Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute in Japan. During a six- month visit Dr. Liebhold will conduct research in the area of spatial models of forest insect outbreak dynamics. The research will develop an empirical modeling approach to forecasting forest defoliator outbreaks. It will model spatial as well as temporal dynamics. The lack of accurate insect outbreak forecasts is perhaps the major impediment to the development of effective integrated pest management programs. Models will be developed that use 20 or more years of historical defoliation maps to forecast defoliation in the next year. The technique will be applied to the beech caterpillar, the gypsy moth and the pine moth in Japan. Historical defoliation data will be used to quantify dependence among locations separated by various distances and directions in spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal dimensions. Results of the research will lead to a superior system for forecasting insect outbreaks. Dr. Liebhold is an accomplished and recognized leader in the field of forest insect population modeling and computer simulation. Dr. Kamata has substantial expertise in the area of population dynamics of forest insect defoliators. The research should improve basic understanding of the spatial dynamics of forest insect populations and will provide the Japanese scientists with the tools for developing more effective forest pest management programs. In addition, the collaboration should further communications between the respective countries and will contribute to development of spatially and temporally explicit models to predict defoliator dynamics of concern in both countries. This project is supported by the NSF-CGP (Center fo r Global Partnership) Science Fellowship Program.
