Do pheromone traps help to reduce new attacks of Ips typographus at the local scale after a sanitary cut?

The spruce bark beetle, Ips typographus, is causing severe economic losses during epidemic phases triggered by droughts and/or windstorms. Sanitation felling and salvage logging are usually the most recommended strategies to limit the damages. However, any additional control method to limit the economic impact of an outbreak would be welcome. In this respect, the efficiency of pheromone trapping is still controversial or poorly documented. In this 2-year study (2020–2021), at the peak of a severe outbreak in Belgium, we quantified the wood volume and presence/absence of new attacks at 126 sites attacked during the previous year and within 100 m from the initial attack. Each site was randomly allocated to one of three treatments: (1) three crosstraps baited with pheromones, (2) one tree-trap baited with pheromones and treated with an insecticide and (3) control sites with no trapping device. The attacked trees of the previous year were all cut and removed before the start of the experiment and newly attacked trees were removed as they were detected. The trapping devices were only active during spring to target overwintering bark beetles that might have escaped the sanitation cuts and to limit the risk of attracting dispersing beetles from outside the patch during the summer. We found a strong decrease of the attacks relative to the previous year in all treatments, including the controls (more than 50% of the control sites had no new attacks). There was no relationship between the new attacks and the attacks of the previous year. In both years, new attacks were more frequent (presence/absence) in sites with crosstraps (95% Confidence Interval [56–84%] of the sites with new attacks) than in sites with a tree-trap (26–57% - p = 0.02) and to a lesser extent than in control sites (32–63%, p = 0.08). In 2020, the attacked volumes were slightly higher in sites with crosstraps (95% Confidence Interval [3.4–14.2 m³]) than in control sites (0.2–3.5 m³, p = 0.04) and no significant difference was found with tree-trap sites (1.1–6.2 m³, p = 0.38). In 2021, there were no significant differences between the volumes attacked in the control sites (1.8–9.4 m³), crosstraps sites (0.9–6.4 m³) and tree-trap sites (0–2.5 m³). Overall, we found no evidence in favor of the efficacy of pheromone trapping during spring to reduce economic damages at the local scale when combined with sanitation felling and during a severe outbreak. The use of baited crosstraps could even be hazardous as it seemed to increase the occurrence of new attacks probably by attracting bark beetles but failing to neutralize them.