Podcast: A Slow Explosion of Damaging Forest Insects

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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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