ips: The spruce bark beetle – An indicator for change

The European spruce bark beetle (Ips typographus), is the most important forest pest in Europe. The term pest describes an organism that causes damage to humans. With spruce as its host tree, the beetle reproduces in the economically most important tree, and its mass reproductions cause millions of dollars in damage to forest owners. Nature, on the other hand, does not know the term pest: the bark beetle has always been part of the forest ecosystem, where it takes on the important task of killing sick trees, making room for a new generation of forest. In a functional system, weak trees and beetles keep each other in balance, but human activity has thrown the forest out of balance: In order to saturate the demand for wood, mixed forests have been replaced by spruce monocultures. These shallow-rooted trees today suffer from the drought and heat of recent years, while the beetle benefits from the increasing temperatures. Is the beetle really a pest, or is it just reacting to external change? The multi-media exhibition ips is the result of intensive research into the change of South Tyrolean forests and the complex entanglement of our ecosystems, forest guardians, forest owners, saw mills and forest administrators.