Loss in value of 132 million euros of the timber to be sold, 20 thousand hectares of forest attacked, an area as large as half the surface already affected by wow: are the damages of the bark beetle typographer made up to now in Lombardy, Veneto, Trentino Alto Adige, Friuli Venezia Giulia. The estimate, updated to 2022, provides it Etifor, a spin off of the University of Padua that deals with the enhancement of the forest heritage in Italy and that has collected and processed these data, monitoring the impacts of the Vaia storm on the territory. In fact, everything starts from there, from that 28 October 2018 in which 9 million cubic meters of wood were crashed into 42,800 hectares of wood.
Everything starts from Vaia
It was Vaia who initiated the proliferation of this beetle which under normal conditions attacks and reproduces in weak plants, especially spruces, contributing to the cleaning of the forest: “The problem is that with the large presence of material on the ground, it has begun to attack healthy trees, leading them to death: from endemic it has become epidemic », explains Lucio Brotto, co-founder of Etifor.
“This year the situation worsened due to the high temperatures that weakened the plants and favored the spread of this insect, which acts in the summer, between July and August: before above 1,500-1,600 it was difficult to find damage, now instead it’s easier », continues Brotto, who estimates the duration of the epidemic phase to be 4-5 years.
The damage in the affected regions
The damages from bark beetle they can approach and in some cases exceed those of the storm that triggered the epidemic: for example, in Lombardy, Vaia has damaged 4,200 hectares and the bark beetle has already affected a further 3,000, to which others will be added in the coming years.
As for the most affected province, that of Trento, Vaia has damaged 20,836 hectares of forest, of which more than half can be classified as serious. In 2021 the hectares attacked by the bark beetle were already 5,300 and in 2022 there were another 3 thousand. In particular, in eastern Trentino, the area most affected by Vaia, monitoring through insect traps has shown increases of close to 20% between 2020 and 2021. Here the Cavalese district alone, the most damaged by far, in 2022 it recorded almost 40% of bark beetle damage in the entire province of Trento, with 3,270 hectors damaged out of a total of 8,350 in Trentino.