Likelihood of occurrence of bark beetle attacks on conifer forests in Honduras under normal and climate change scenarios

Conifer forests cover approximately 27% of Honduras (similar to 3 million ha), and have been traditionally affected by bark beetle (Dendroctonus frontalis) outbreaks. These outbreaks impact ecosystem health and predispose more attacks. We developed a logistic model to assess the forests' susceptibility to a beetle attack. Models were fitted using climatic, topographic and remote sensing variables. We show a method to generate pseudo-absences based on a multitemporal wetness index. Our optimized threshold to convert the continuum of probabilities into 0 and 1 value was 0.65. Our overall accuracy was 68.7%. We also developed models that integrate climate change scenarios. Our predictions signal an increase in the overall susceptibility for an attack when including climate change scenarios. To the best of our knowledge this is the first effort to develop a spatially explicit model of the probability of beetle outbreaks in a Central American country.