Protection of forests from pests and diseases

The Belarusian woods are under continuous influence of adverse factors of the environment. Periodically they are exposed to negative impact of gale-force and squally winds, mean insects and diseases, droughts, excess moistening and wildfires. Increasing the biological stability of forest plantations and taking care of forest health is the main task of forest protection services.

The control system for damage to forest plantations, changes in the number of populations of harmful insects, the development of diseases and other pathological processes is ensured when conducting forest pathological monitoring.

Forest pathological monitoring is conducted on the whole area of the forest fund by different methods, the main one of which is ground-based. Regular observations and accounts are carried out on the allocated sites of the wood with a total area of 353 thousand hectares, emergence and development of the main harmful types of wreckers and diseases which can cause essential damage to the wood are monitored.

Forest pathological surveys are conducted annually on an area of more than 1.2 million hectares and allow recording current changes in the forest fund, assessing the degree of damage to forests due to the negative impact of natural factors.

Materials of forest pathological monitoring are used to designate and take measures to localize and eliminate pest outbreaks and improve the efficiency of sanitation.

Protection of the woods is carried out with use of ecologically safe medicines, meeting the international requirements of certification of the woods and allowed for application in the Republic of Belarus. In especially protected natural territories only biological means of protection of the wood are applied.

In the republic there is a serious scientific potential, which allows to ensure the protection of forests at the modern level and taking into account the world practice. The Belarusian State University has developed and manufactured pheromones for pheromone surveillance of the main pine- and leaf-eating species of supervised insects, which are used in forest pathological monitoring of the forest fund.

At the Institute-of- Forest of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus the phytopathologic center of forest wood types in which technologies of early diagnostics and identification of originators of infectious diseases of forest wood views with use of molecular and genetic methods are applied is framed. The DNA collection and the genetic database more than one hundred types of local phytopathogenic strains is created.

Improvement of system of protection of the woods on the basis of use of highly effective technologies positively affects the ecological and resource potential of the woods and will promote maintaining natural wealth of Republic of Belarus.

In the forest fund of the Ministry of Forestry of the Republic of Belarus, as a result of measures taken in 2016, the area of foci of pests and forest diseases decreased by 1.23 thousand hectares by the same period of last year and amounted to 161.4 thousand hectares. The sanitary cuttings and felling cuttings made it possible to reduce the number of active forest disease centers requiring forest management activities by 2.0 thousand hectares, or 4.8%, to last year's level and to reduce their area to 39.8 thousand hectares.

More information about the forest protection service at the State Institution "Bellesozashchita"