Podcast: A Slow Explosion of Damaging Forest Insects

By Jonathan Yales

Great Lakes Echo and the Northern Research Station of the USDA Forest Service are collaborating to share the first season of their podcast, Forestcast.

In 1957, a British ecologist, Charles S. Elton, gave three radio presentations entitled “Balance and Barrier.” Within a year, he had expanded these ideas into what was to become a bible for practitioners of a burgeoning new science: invasion biology.

In a tribute to those broadcasts, the Northern Research Station of the USDA Forest Service launched a six-episode series that explores biological invasions — and their repercussions — in the Midwest and the Northeast.

A biological invasion is an enormous increase in population of some kind of living organism. It happens when an organism — like an insect — arrives somewhere beyond its previous range, when it breaks out past its natural barrier, unbalancing the biological order.

Listen to, Episode 1: A Slow Explosion of Damaging Forest Insects, below:

The full six-episode season of Forestcast is published now. Listen and subscribe below.

Subscribe to Forestcast:

Jonathan Yales works with the USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station via a research joint venture agreement with Michigan State University’s Department of Entomology.

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