Erroneous conclusions about current geographical distribution and future expansion of forest insects in Northern Sweden: comments on Hof and Svahlin (2015)

ABSTRACTWe question the validity of the results and the conclusions from a study entitled “The potential effect of climate change on the geographical distribution of insect pest species in the Swedish boreal forest” that was recently published in Scandinavian Journal of Forest Research. The main problem is that for several of the species the current geographical distributions presented in the paper (based on modeling of a limited set of occurrence data) are vastly underestimated compared with distribution maps in standard reference literature and other available occurrence data. As a consequence of that the predicted major future range expansions of these important pest species are also erroneous.