The International Conferences on Conservation of Forest Genetic Resources in Siberia

The Next Conferences Address Is: http://conf.nsc.ru/cfgrs2011/

Abstracts

Botanical gardens as model systems to study resistance of alien woody plants to native pests and diseases

Kirichenko N., Yuri Baranchikov, Maria Tomoshevich, Marc Kenis

V.N. Sukachev Institute of Forest,
Siberian Branch,
Russian Academy of Sciences (SB RAS) (Krasnoyarsk)

Deliberate movement of species between regions (i.e. introduction) and penetration of alien pests and diseases to new regions (i.e. biological invasion) have a significant ecological impact to aborigine communities. Botanical gardens are excellent model systems to study resistance of the introduced plants to native pests and diseases and to test various ecological hypothesis linked to biological invasions. Botanical gardens gather together great number of plant species from different botanical-floristic regions and the introduced plants often grow in the surrounding of congeneric native plants. In these conditions, introduced plants are often a target to native insect pests and plant pathogens.  In their turn, the introduced plants can be a source of new pests and diseases that either come together with their host or invade soon after the host introduction.

Together with the colleagues from the EU research project PRATIQUE we have started inspections of arboreta in Siberia to specify Asian insects causing damage to alien trees and shrubs, particularly of European origin. In 2008, several pests and diseases were found and few of them caused noticeable damaged to some introduced tree species. Some pests were detected, mainly leaf miners, never noticed before for the studying area. In Siberian botanical gardens and, in parallel, in Swiss botanical gardens we test whether alien trees are less (or more) attacked by native insects and, thus, possibly less or more resistant to them, than their congeneric species. In 2008, we focused our study on leaf miners. This functional group of insects is widely presented on various plant taxons. We arranged host plant couples involving the introduced plant species, mainly of European origin in Siberia and of Asian origin in Switzerland, and native congeneric plant species, growing in vicinity in the same botanical garden. The same numbers of leaves on alien and native plant species were carefully inspected and number of mines counted and leaf-miners diversity studied.

The preliminary results showed no difference in intensity of attacks of alien tree species and native congenerics in Siberia. Similar observations in Swiss botanical gardens, carried out on a larger number of tree species, indicated that leaf miner richness and number of miners attacks were lower on exotic trees than on European congenerics. In Central Europe, alien plant species could be more resistant to native pests, than European plants. It still has to be verified whether alien plants of European origin are less resistant to native insects than their congenerics in Siberia. In 2009 the number of inspected alien tree species and functional groups of arthropods will be enlarged and bigger number of couples alien-native plants will be tested in Siberia.

Note. Abstracts are published in author's edition

Comments
[ICT SBRAS]
[Home]
[Conference]

© 1996-2000, Institute of computational Techologies SB RAS, Novosibirsk
© 1996-2000, Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Science, Novosibirsk