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Data from: Spatial and temporal patterns of bark beetle and defoliator outbreaks, and their interactions, in the Pacific Northwest

Pane, Alexander12; Carroll, Allan3; Harvey, Brian1; Tobin, Patrick1

Published Apr 22, 2026 on Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.crjdfn3k8

Data files

Apr 22, 2026 version files 95.02 MB

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Abstract

The dynamics of many forest insects are changing in response to climate warming; however, patterns are not always consistent among or within taxa. Changes in outbreak dynamics for individual species have received much recent attention, but the potential for interactions among species has received less. We used historical aerial survey data (1960-2019) from conifer-dominated forests of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia to quantify spatial dynamics of bark beetles, defoliators, and their interactions across local and regional scales, and to measure how these dynamics have changed through time. The historical aerial survey data are archived by the British Columbia Ministry of Forests & Canadian Forest Service, and the USDA Forest Service, as cited in the paper; these data contain a record of aerially detected forest biotic disturbance agents (e.g., insects and plant pathogens) that date to the 1940s. From this large dataset, we subset those biotic disturbance agents specific to our study region (Oregon and Washington, USA, and British Columbia, Canada), which are listed in Table 1 in Pane et al. 2026, between 1960 and 2019. The subset data used in our study is archived here. The subset dataset contains 2034477 rows and 7 columns. Each row lists (1) a unique number associated with each grid cell, (2 and 3) the geospatial locations, (4) the year the biotic disturbance agent was detected or (5) the one year lag in detection (specific to bark beetle damage), (6) the biotic disturbance agent detected, and (7) and the area of the aerially detected disturbance. More details are contained in the README file.