Attacking the Spruce Budworm

While the spruce budworm poses a severe threat to spruce-fir forests of Canada and the northern United States, the threat to mature stands of economically valuable trees can be contained temporarily by yearly spraying. The spraying approach to budworm control led to biological modeling work, which analyzed budworm growth using both computer simulation and systems of differential equations. The history and mathematical details of the biological modeling work, which was completed in the 1970s, is explained well in UMAP monograph [Tuchinsky 198 11.