lydemapr: an R package to track the spread of the invasive Spotted Lanternfly (Lycorma delicatula, White 1845) (Hemiptera, Fulgoridae) in the United States

Abstract

A crucial asset in the management of invasive species is the open-access sharing of data on the range of invaders and the progression of their spread. Such data should be current, comprehensive, consistent, and standardized, to support reproducible and comparable forecasting efforts among multiple researchers and managers. Here, we present the lydemapr R package containing spatiotemporal data and mapping functions to visualize the current spread of the spotted lanternfly (Lycorma delicatula, White 1841) in the Western Hemisphere. The spotted lanternfly is a forest and agricultural pest in the eastern Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S., where it was first discovered in 2014. As of 2022, it has been found in 12 states according to state and federal departments of agriculture. However, the lack of easily accessible, fine-scale data on its spread hampers research and management efforts. We obtained multiple memoranda-of-understanding from several agencies and citizen-science projects, gaining access to their internal data on spotted lanternfly point observations. We then cleaned, harmonized, anonymized, and combined the individual data sources into a single comprehensive dataset. The resulting dataset contains spatial data gridded at the 1 km2 resolution, with yearly information on the presence/absence of spotted lanternflies, establishment status, and population density across 658,392 observations. The lydemapr package will aid researchers, managers, and the public in their understanding, modeling, and managing of the spread of this invasive pest.

Quantifying population resistance to climatic variability: The invasive spotted lanternfly grape pest is buffered against temperature extremes in California

“…Large changes in annual growth make it likely that this pest can adapt quickly and require additional allocation of control resources to maintain target pest abundances within vineyards. Thus, understanding population resistance to temperature variability is complex, but allows for accurate forecasting that must be tested with broadscale monitoring data (De Bona et al, 2023) coupled to field-based individual tracking of pest fitness to estimate adaptation (Belouard and Behm, 2023b).…”

“…We implement the model using large ensembles of stochastically generated temperature profiles endowed with both trend and noise components, and compute the reproductive number, 𝑅𝑅 0 , as the multiplicative factor by which the population changes in one year for each temperature profile (e.g., Dee et al, 2020). The PDE is of the spotted lanternfly (SLF, Lycorma delicatula), an invasive planthopper establishing across the U.S. (De Bona et al, 2023). SLF is known to feed on over 150 plant species present in North America, including grape (Barringer and Ciafré, 2020;.…”