Assessment of the climatic suitability for invasive agricultural insect pests in a warming Europe based on Köppen-Geiger classification

Climate change can modify suitable areas for the establishment of harmful insect species in Europe, thus leading to a geographical shift of pest establishment areas.This paper aims to analyse the potential impact of future climate change on the climatic suitability areas of 14 invasive agricultural insect species in Europe.The approach is based on pest occurrence data and Kppen-Geiger (KG) climate classification.Depending on data availability, occurrence data were extracted from one/two types of open-access datasets, and the sensitivity of the results to different pest occurrence datasets was analysed.The KG maps under present (1991-2020) climate conditions and three future (2071-2099) climate change scenarios ('low-emissions', 'middle-of-the-road', 'high-emissions') were used successively to identify the KG classes where each pest was recorded present.These classes were then used to determine the potential climatic suitability of Europe for each insect species under current and future climate conditions, and identify possible shifts in suitable areas resulting from climate change.Results show that overall, the climatic suitability areas are likely to expand in Europe for most of the 14 insect species due to future climate change, and that the increase level would be higher under the 'high-emissions' and 'middle-of-the-road' scenarios than under the 'low-emissions' scenario.Insect species adapted to high temperatures could see their suitable areas expand in warming Europe and move northwards.Our analysis reveals a high sensitivity of the estimated suitable areas to the set of occurrence data used to identify KG classes, underlining the importance of collecting reliable occurrence data.