Moroccan locust and their potential outbreaks in future. Learning from past and present environment conditions based on EO, geospatial and modelling datasets.

Kurzfassung

Transboundary pests such as Moroccan locust represent a significant concern of regular local to regional outbreaks within its huge natural habitat across European, African and Asian continent. The outbreaks are intensified by factors such as climate change, and land use practices that create favorable environment for these agricultural pests. Transboundary pests such as Moroccan locusts pose a direct threat to food security and livelihoods through devouring vegetation including food and industrial crops and pastures. Moreover, the crisis response, often involving hazardous broad-spectrum pesticides, can lead to considerable environmental, biodiversity, and human health repercussions. The challenge of preventing and controlling any locust outbreaks early on, particularly considering better forecast and effective monitoring is well-recognized but is not yet implemented. In this context, this work presents how relevant parameter can be monitored effectively using remote sensing data and methods to improve forecast and monitoring across large habitat territory of Moroccan lost. Improvements and effort are geared towards safeguarding food security, livelihoods, and the environment, with a specific focus on the hot spots of Moroccan locust outbreaks where these challenges are most pressing. This work includes modelling of historical conditions, present situation and takes also future climate scenarios into account to better understand how this locust pest will be distributed under changing climate conditions. We apply the open source Ecological Niche Model R-software package (ENMTML) to special-specific selection of environmental variables. The variables selection and preprocessing included a harmonization to enable comparable results for three time periods (past: 1970-2000, present: 2000-2021, future: 2021-2040). Environmental variables are derived from different Earth observation (EO) and geospatial sources, including satellite based meteorological datasets, vegetation and soil moisture conditions, soil properties and geomorphological parameters. First results indicate that there is a northward shift as well a shift towards higher latitudes of suitable habitat conditions for Moroccan locust breeding. Furthermore, the core hotspot areas are also changing in regards to intensity and geographical distribution. We present the modelling results in different habitat suitable categories and show how intensity and geographical distribution is changing over seven decades. Furthermore, a detailed statistical analysis is done to identify main driving factors for Moroccan locust outbreaks. Besides suitable environmental conditions, the current land management is most important driver. This contextual knowledge and monitoring of land cover changes in the light of pest managements provide new possibilities for preventive measurements and improvement in pest outbreak forecast.