10 August 2024 Climbing arborists assess beetle numbers at Hyde Park
I recently attended a tree climbing event organised by City of Canning and City of Vincent. Not because I am particularly good at climbing trees, but because there were a bunch of professional tree climbers that were volunteering their time to do something about polyphagous shothole borer (PSHB).
PSHB is a recently arrived pest species under eradication orders and it is causing some chaos in Perth as authorities try to get a handle on it.
I attended, because the climbing team wanted some advice about their sampling design and what might be done with the data they collect. I organised the sampling design and, with Matt Clark from city of Canning, we helped climbers and their assistants collect structured data on numbers of beetles in some iconic moreton bay figs in Perth’s Hyde Park.
The event went really well and, with a follow up climbing event a few weeks later, we were able to generate some useful data on detection probabilities and beetle load in each of these heritage trees. Surprisingly, that load was tiny: there are definitely beetles in those massive trees, but the volume of beetles would be best measured in teaspoons.
