Healthy forest trees make productive forestries: an overview of pest and disease management research

The role of forest health research is to develop cost-effective, environmentally sustainable management options for pests and pathogens that can cause considerable damage resulting in significant economic losses. Hardwood (eucalypt) plantations are attacked by insects moving from native forest into these large even-aged monocultures which provide a vast resource allowing rapid population buildup. Major pest guilds of eucalypts include sap suckers, defoliators and stem borers. Softwood (pine) plantations have fewer pest species, but the exotic pine woodwasp has recently established in Queensland and threatens productivity in subtropical areas. Our current forest health research includes resistance breeding, optimising site nutrition, landscape modelling for predicting risk factors, enhancing natural enemies for biological control in plantations, and exploiting chemical signalling pathways between pests and hosts. Key pests of hardwood plantations include erinose mites, leaf beetles and stem borers and specific research results on these groups will be discussed