The Forest Trapping Network (FTN) forms a major part of GB’s Future Surveillance Plan (FSP).

The FSP is a Great Britain-wide, broad-spectrum strategy to monitor quarantine and priority insect pests of forests included in the Plant Health (Phytosanitary Conditions) (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020. The FSP outlines several survey techniques which target species on the EU-survey list. These include drone, visual and aerial surveys, but some insect species on the list cannot be monitored using these techniques.

The FTN was developed as a key part of the FSP and fills this gap by targeting quarantine and priority species which the other survey methods cannot detect. The FTN is a rolling programme which will survey 100 forests for EU-survey list insect pests over five years. In each forest, plots of oak, pine, spruce, fir and mature mixed broadleaf are chosen to target different insect pest species. The FTN is currently in the first year of the Beta-phase (2022 – 2025), with the first full 5-year reporting period commencing in 2025 and finishing in 2030. The alpha-phase of the project ran from 2020-2022, testing different lure and forest-type combinations. The FTN in 2022 deployed 38 traps across 10 sites in SE England. We trapped 10,247 individuals from 48 species or genera of interest to tree health, including a very good sampling coverage of Scolytinae (bark beetles), of which we trapped 34 species across all sites. During the first year of the FTN, one quarantine insect species, Ips typographus, was trapped at one site in SE England, and other economically important species, such as Xylosandrus germanus and Hylobius abietis were also caught across the network.

The FTN in 2022 provided interesting information about the flight patterns and habitat preferences of common species and about species abundances and diversity across different forest types.