Data Paper |
Corresponding author: Andrea Ros-Candeira ( andrearos@ugr.es ) Academic editor: Christian Schmidt
© 2019 Andrea Ros-Candeira, Antonio Jesús Pérez-Luque, María Suárez-Muñoz, Francisco Javier Bonet-García, José A. Hódar, Fernando Giménez de Azcárate, Elena Ortega-Díaz.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Ros-Candeira A, Pérez-Luque AJ, Suárez-Muñoz M, Bonet-García FJ, Hódar JA, Giménez de Azcárate F, Ortega-Díaz O (2019) Dataset of occurrence and incidence of pine processionary moth in Andalusia, south Spain. ZooKeys 852: 125-136. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.852.28567
Resource citation:
Ros Candeira A, Pérez-Luque A J, Suárez Muñoz M, Bonet García F J, Hódar Correa J A (2018). Dataset of occurrence and incidence of pine processionary moth in Andalusia (South Spain). Version 2.4. Sierra Nevada Global Change Observatory. Andalusian Environmental Center, University of Granada, Regional Government of Andalusia. Sampling event dataset 10.15470/s1mxjb accessed via GBIF.org on 2019-05-30.
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This dataset provides information about infestation caused by the pine processionary moth (Thaumetopoea pityocampa ([Denis & Schiffermüller], 1775)) in pure or mixed pine woodlands and plantations in Andalusia. It represents a long-term series (1993–2015) containing 81,908 records that describe the occurrence and incidence of this species. Data were collected within a monitoring programme known as COPLAS, developed by the Regional Ministry of Environment and Territorial Planning of the Andalusian Regional Government within the frame of the Plan de Lucha Integrada contra la Procesionaria del Pino (Plan for Integrated Control Against the Pine Processionary Moth).
In particular, this dataset includes 4,386 monitoring stands which, together with the campaign year, define the dataset events in Darwin Core Archive. Events are related with occurrence data which show if the species is present or absent. In turn, the event data have a measurement associated: degree of infestation.
Degree of defoliation, forest pest, monitoring, pine plantations, pine woodlands, sampling event, southern Iberian Peninsula, Thaumetopoea pityocampa
Monitoring programmes are conducted in numerous countries and regions affected by this forest defoliator. The detection of this species is simple, since larvae nests are easily visible on affected trees and defoliation becomes obvious at a certain level of infestation. Thus, monitoring often consists on the assignment of infestation indexes to plots based on visual observation and following a discrete scale (see “Methods”).
Unfortunately, those existing time series are rarely available for the scientific community. In the case of GBIF, the volume of data regarding this species is scarce (Fig.
The whole dataset includes 81,908 records that describe the occurrence of a single species: Thaumetopoea pityocampa ([Denis & Schiffermüller], 1775).
The pine processionary moth is a well-known species, receiving a great attention by the scientific community, from medicine to ecology. In October 2017, Web of Science referred 400 publications mentioning this species, showing an increasing tendency in the last decades (Fig.
In Andalusia, Thaumetopoea pityocampa is one of the species that causes the most extensive impact to the pine forests, either natural or planted. The typical distribution area of this species is conditioned by climate and associated with Mediterranean and circum-Mediterranean regions (
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Insecta
Order: Lepidoptera
Family: Notodontidae
Genus: Thaumetopoea
Species: Thaumetopoea pityocampa ([Denis & Schiffermüller], 1775)
Common Name: pine processionary moth
General spatial coverage
Andalusia is located in Southern Spain and covers around 87,597 km². This is a region characterised by great climate variability. Though the majority of the surface is classified as Mediterranean climate type (Csa, according to Köppen’s classification) (
The forest area, and specifically coniferous formations which encompass pine forests, has increased intensely during the second half of the 20th century. Due to past reforestation projects (
In this scenario, Thaumetopoea pityocampa has found a large surface for its activity producing an impact on forests because of defoliation.
Coordinates
36°2’35.53’’N, 38°37’12.03’’N Latitude; 7°26’8.72’’W, 1°52’27.71’’W Longitude
1993–2015
Project title
Plan de Lucha Integrada contra la Procesionaria del Pino (Plan for Integrated Control Against the Pine Processionary Moth)
Study area description
The target ecosystem of the project is the great majority of Andalusian pure or mixed pine woodlands and plantations (
Design description
Following European and national regulations regarding forest management and use of phytosanitary products, the Regional Ministry of Environment and Territorial Planning of Andalusian Regional Government implemented the Plan for Integrated Control Against the Pine Processionary Moth (hereafter referred as Plan), which began in 1991. This Plan came into place aiming to assess the evolution of this pest and defining preventive and control measures. As part of that, COPLAS monitoring programme was developed. It consisted of assessing annual defoliation caused by this species on pines and counting of nests through human observation. A survey system was designed to store the generated information, which is collected in a form for each monitoring stand. Within the plan, an important step after assessing the level of damage consists of issuing a proposal for actions or treatments and execute those control measures. According to the incidence of this species, the Plan considers different treatments to maintain the pine processionary moth population below a certain threshold, for example, from manual treatment of the nests or pheromone traps to spray treatments (
The Plan was designed mainly from a preventive point of view, with the aim of controlling the population of the pest, but contemplating its dynamic character, incorporating large surfaces and new techniques over time. For instance, aerial spraying, a common procedure initiated a few years ago to reduce defoliation impact, is now almost completely forbidden according to EU guidelines (Directive 2019/128/EU). Treatments are, at the present moment, restricted to specific areas in which the pine processionary moth may have a direct impact on human or livestock.
For the monitoring programme COPLAS, pine forests were divided into monitoring stands according to administrative and environmental criteria defined in the Plan. Every year, these stands were visited at the end of the defoliating season (from end of winter to beginning of spring) and a defoliation degree was assigned to the plot based on observation of the stand as a whole.
The result was the production of a scale ranging from 0 to 5 which represents the degree of infestation by the pine processionary moth:
Since this defoliation assessment was used to define further management measures, this initial assessment could be checked and further adjusted by a technician when plots were assigned a degree equal or higher than 3. Plots assigned with a degree of 2 were also checked if they were next to plots assigned with a degree of 3.
Every year, the Plan increased the area covered by the monitoring stands (
All data were stored in a normalised database (PostgreSQL) and incorporated into the Information System of Sierra Nevada Global-Change Observatory (
The sampling event data, occurrence, and measurement data were accommodated to fulfil the Darwin Core Standard (
The Darwin Core elements for the sampling event data included in the dataset are: eventID, modified, language, institutionCode, collectionCode, continent, country, countryCode, stateProvince, county, eventDate, habitat, minimumElevationInMeters, maximumElevationInMeters, decimalLatitude, decimalLongitude, geodeticDatum, coordinateUncertaintyInMeters, samplingProtocol, sampleSizeValue, sampleSizeUnit, footprintWKT. For the occurrence data the elements are: occurrenceID, catalogNumber, eventID, eventDate, basisOfRecord, scientificName, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, specificEpithet, scientificNameAuthorship, associatedTaxa, recordedBy, occurrenceStatus. For the measurement data, the Darwin Core elements included were: measurementID, eventID, measurementType, measurementValue, measurementUnit, measurementDeterminedBy, measurementDeterminedDate, measurementMethod.
The scientific names were checked with databases of Catalogue of Life/Species 2000 (
Dataset description
Object name: Darwin Core Archive COPLAS: Dataset of occurrence and incidence of pine processionary moth in Andalusia (South Spain)
Character encoding: UTF-8
Format name: Darwin Core Archive Format (
Format version: 1.0
Distribution: http://ipt.gbif.es/resource?r=coplas
Publication date of data: 2018-04-20
Language: English
Licenses of use: this dataset is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Metadata language: English
Date of metadata creation: 2018-04-20
Hierarchy level: Dataset
We are especially grateful to all the forest rangers that annually collect the raw data for the monitoring programme. Many thanks to the managers involved in COPLAS as Sixto Rodríguez Reviriego and Ángel Carrasco Gotarredona. We also thank Katia Cezón (Spanish GBIF node-CSIC) for technical support and the reviewer Alberto Zilli for his insightful comments. This work has been carried out under the conceptual framework and cooperative spirit of the Sierra Nevada Global Change Observatory and it was supported by the H2020 project “ECOPOTENTIAL: Improving future ecosystem benefits through earth observations” (http://www.ecopotential-project.eu/), which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 641762. Thanks are due to the projects that fund the research with the following contracts: A. J. Pérez-Luque has a contract within the project LIFE-ADAPTAMED (LIFE14 CCA/ES/000612): “Protection of key ecosystem services by adaptive management of Climate Change endangered Mediterranean socioecosystems” and A. Ros Candeira has a contract within the National Youth Guarantee System and the operational programme “Youth Employment” financed by the European Social Fund.