The right tree in the right place? A major economic tree species poses major ecological threats

Conservation futures 2050: Developing future scenarios to explore potential socio-economic developments and their impact on biodiversity

Large scale changes in biodiversity and conservation management require long-term goals and planning across multiple sectors in the face of increasing global change. Major trends in land use and management interventions, species additions or losses, and climate are well recognized, but responses are still often short-term and fragmented across agencies and sectors. Scenario-building can be a powerful tool to imagine possible futures, integrating across sectors and disciplines and promoting long-term thinking and planning. As an interdisciplinary team of experts, we developed potential scenarios for a range of future environmental conditions. The scenarios explored: increasing land ownership and stewardship of land by indigenous peoples (Māori); widespread afforestation using native tree species; national-scale eradication of invasive mammalian predators; and increasing frequency of extreme weather events. We explored the implications of these globally-relevant trends at a national scale using Aotearoa New Zealand as our study system. Detailed descriptions of these scenarios were developed by experts using environmental, economic, social science and policy lenses. Across scenarios several common themes were consistently highlighted, including the importance of land use in driving other conservation outcomes. How the value of ecosystem services is recognized and prioritized was also important to a wide range of outcomes. Furthermore, each scenario presented both opportunities and risks to equality, indigenous empowerment and human capital, emphasizing the importance of good policy responses to maximize benefits and minimize unintended harm. These scenarios will be used to stimulate new questions and ideas for biodiversity conservation and management, such as considering the implications of different potential futures for the management of biological invasions. This approach is explicitly designed to be generalisable across different sites or regions and provides a method for considering the implications of potential future changes for a broad range of disciplines or needs.

The Potential of Wild Yeasts as Promising Biocontrol Agents against Pine Canker Diseases

Native wild yeasts from forest ecosystems represent an interesting potential source of biocontrol organisms in synergy with disease-tolerant forest materials. Yeasts have a combination of competitive mechanisms and low requirements for their biotechnological application as biocontrol agents. The current study aimed to increase the number of biocontrol candidates against Fusarium circinatum and Diplodia sapinea. The enzymatic and antagonistic activities of the biocontrol candidates were evaluated using different screening methods, in which the direct impact on the growth of the pathogen was measured as well as some properties such as cellulose and lignin degradation, tolerance to biocides, volatile compound production, or iron effect, which may be of interest in biotechnological processes related to the management of forest diseases. A total of 58 yeast strains belonging to 21 different species were obtained from oak forest and vineyard ecosystems and evaluated. The application of yeast treatment behaved differently depending on the pathogen and the plant clone. The 2g isolate (Torulaspora delbrueckii) showed the highest inhibitory activity for D. sapinea and 25q and 90q (Saccharomyces paradoxus) for F. circinatum. Clones IN416 and IN216 were the most susceptible and the most tolerant to D. sapinea, respectively, while the opposite was observed for F. circinatum.