Ecological risk of forest insect outbreaks, modeling and decision-making in the tasks of forest protection
Insects' outbreaks are cyclic iterative processes. Outbreaks and forest fires are major factors in determining location, formation and productivity of Russian forests. It is necessary to develop and put into practice new effective forest protection methods of insect pests densi-ty estimation, assessing the impact of external factors on the insects, modeling and prediction of population dynamics, new methods of decision-making in the planning of forest protection to prevent and minimize damage from insects impacts. It is proposed to use methods of the phenomenological theory of population dynamics and model of outbreaks as a phase transition for estimation of critical population density. It is possible to calculate the critical density of populations of several species of insect by using the proposed approaches. The models of outbreaks spatial dynamics are proposed that take into account the ratio of characteristic times of changes in the outbreak's area and pest population density. We propose a population-energy model of the interaction of insects with food and intro-duce the notion of ecological food prices, a price and withdrawal price of food consumption and prices are given for assessing the environmental food for insect populations at different stages of the outbreak to model food consumption and insect damage forecast of plantation. We consider the general scheme of decision-making process in planning and implement-ing protective measures. This scheme includes an assessment of the current state of the pest population and its associated ecosystem components, prediction of environmental risk, the choice of the optimal scenario of protection activities, forecast and evaluate the effectiveness of protective measures.