In recent months, the IPM Popillia Consortium has collaborated with SPOTTERON to create informational and dissemination materials about the invasive Japanese beetle (Popillia japonica), which has been spreading across Europe for several years. Recently, the materials were published and sent to contacts in the agricultural sector and plant heal...
Since 2023, the village of Kloten north of Zurich is not only famous for the Zurich Airport and for having a great ice hockey team, but also for harboring the first Popillia population in Europe north of the Alps. In summer and autumn of 2023, huge efforts were made to eradicate this population, including insecticide sprays, the erection of LLINs-t...
Here is an interactive map showing the suitability of Europe for the Japanese beetle (Popillia japonica).
This map is the result of our INRAE team's modelling efforts and shows predictions of environmental suitability. You can read more about this work in our previous blog post and in our recent publication (Borner et al., 2023).
As we've said before, a good strategy for early detection of an invasion is to consider the risk of invasion. By modelling the environmental suitability of Europe for the Japanese beetle (Popillia japonica) and therefore the risk of its establishment, our INRAE team has laid the first building block of a surveillance strategy. This work has recently been published (Borner et al., 2023; https://doi.org/10.1127/entomologia/2023/2073) and we describe the main results here.
We thought it would be useful to update the list of P. japonica host plants. In this respect, the dataset deposited by Tayeh et al. (2023) serves two purposes: (1) to provide a list of the host plants of Popillia japonica via a comprehensive review of the scientific literature; (2) to classify these host plants as main or secondary host, based on t...
Europe is facing the first Japanese beetle outbreak north of the alps. The phytosanitary service of Zurich in Switzerland has detected Popillia japonica in monitoring traps and on herbs and shrubs in an area close to the airport of Zurich. The deliminated infested zone is rather small, and the low numbers of beetles caught indicate that the outbrea...
Here's our updated map illustrating the dynamics of the ongoing invasion of the Japanese beetle in Continental Europe. This current version (V3, June 2023) includes regions Piedmont, Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, Valle Aosta (Italy), and Ticino (Switzerland) over the period 2015-2022. The map captures the dynamics of the invasion at the...
The IPM Popillia Citizen Science App is constantly evolving and improving to meet targets and be a brilliant tool for finding and recording sightings of the invasive Popillia japonica.
The Japanese beetle was accidentally introduced to mainland Europe and detected for the first-time near Milan (Italy) in 2014. As a quarantine insect pest, its populations are strictly monitored. However, we did not find a map illustrating the dynamics of the ongoing invasion. So, we produced it! At first, the interactive map that we make available...
