Bark beetles can have significant socio-economic impacts during outbreak episodes. Between 2018 and 2021, for example, they caused the degradation of hundreds of millions of cubic metres of Spruce. With international trade, new bark beetle species could continue to arrive. To limit the risks, the AFSCA (Federal Agency for the Safety of the Food Chain) and other Belgian organisations are setting up monitoring systems involving trapping and morphological identification of intercepted bark beetles.
The METACOL project, funded by the Public Health departement of the SPF (Federal Public Service), is testing a new identification method known as DNA metabarcoding. This method makes it possible to identify a species from a small fragment of its DNA, drawing on modern sequencing techniques that can simultaneously analyse the DNA of multiple organisms present in a single sample. The aim is to test the effectiveness of this technique for bark beetle identification. The project will run from 2025 to 2028, carried out collaboratively by the Entomology Laboratories of the Instituut voor Landbouw-, Visserij- en Voedingsonderzoek (ILVO) and the Centre Wallon de Recherches agronomiques (CRA-W).