Model analysis of mountain pine beetle (Coleoptera: Scolytidae) seasonality

The mountain pine beetle, Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins, is a natural disturbance agent of considerable consequence in western pine forests. This economically and ecologically important insect has a strong requisite for maintaining a strict seasonality. Given this ecological requirement, it is somewhat surprising that no evidence for diapause or other physiological tinting mechanism has been found. Seasonality and phenological timing for this species are apparently under direct temperature control. We investigate the consequences of direct temperature control by first constructing a computationally efficient phenology model based on previously published temperature dependent developmental data. We explored the dynamic properties of this model when subjected to observed microhabitat temperatures representing a range of thermal habitats from one region of the mountain pine beetle distribution. We also investigated the consequences of global climate change on phenology and seasonality. Our results indicate that an adaptive seasonality is a natural consequence of the interaction between developmental parameters and seasonal temperatures. Although this adaptive phenology appears to be resilient to temperature fluctuations, changes in climate within the magnitude of predicted climate change under a CO(2) doubling scenario are capable of shifting a thermally hostile environment to a thermally benign environment. Similarly, increasing temperature by the same amount resulted in phenological disruption of a previously favorable thermal habitat. We discuss the implications of these results for restricting the current distribution of mountain pine beetle, and the potential for shifting distribution caused by global climate change.