FAO Representation in Georgia hosted a field visit of a delegation of the forestry health experts from the Islamic Republic of Iran. During the three-day technical tour on the ground, specialists from the National Forestry Agency of Georgia shared with their Iranian counterparts the experience and knowledge that has been acquired and being applied for fighting the box tree moth in the western regions of the country.

“Georgia and Iran have natural box tree forests and the trees are endangered because of the newly emerged moth. In Georgia, we have an action plan to control these pests. We deal with this issue with advanced methods and achieve quite good results. We are glad to share our experience with our colleagues from Iran,” said Giorgi Mamadashvili, National Forestry Agency of Georgia entomologist. 

The visit was supported by FAO Forestry Policy and Resources Division under the FAO TCP project: “Assistance to Strengthening the Resilience of Zagros Forests to Oak Decline and Caspian Forests to Boxwood Blight and Development of National Forest Monitoring System in the Islamic Republic of Iran”.

“We face the similar problems with the box tree moth in Iran. We took some actions against the pests, but the methods did not work efficiently. We will study Georgian experience and their methods against the pest and consider using them in Iranian forests in the future,” said Bahram Naseri, the Head of the Caspian Forest Tree Seed Centre of Forest, Rangelands and Watershed Organization (FRWO) in Iran.

Box trees or boxwoods (Buxus colchica) are slow-growing evergreen shrubs and small trees native to South Caucasian and Caspian forests. The Cydalima perspectalis, or the box tree moth, is a species of moth first recorded in Europe in 2006. 

The moth can devastate a box tree within a short time. In 2012, the moth was introduced to the region from Italy with the replanting of a box trees in Sochi during the preparation for the 2014 Winter Olympics . The next year the moth began to defoliate Buxus colchica in large numbers.