Data from: Spatial and temporal patterns of bark beetle and defoliator outbreaks, and their interactions, in the Pacific Northwest

The dynamics of many forest insects are changing in response to climate
warming; however, patterns are not always consistent among or within taxa.
Changes in outbreak dynamics for individual species have received much
recent attention, but the potential for interactions among species has
received less. We used historical aerial survey data (1960-2019) from
conifer-dominated forests of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia to
quantify spatial dynamics of bark beetles, defoliators, and their
interactions across local and regional scales, and to measure how these
dynamics have changed through time. The historical aerial survey data are
archived by the British Columbia Ministry of Forests & Canadian
Forest Service, and the USDA Forest Service, as cited in the paper; these
data contain a record of aerially detected forest biotic disturbance
agents (e.g., insects and plant pathogens) that date to the 1940s. From
this large dataset, we subset those biotic disturbance agents specific to
our study region (Oregon and Washington, USA, and British Columbia,
Canada), which are listed in Table 1 in Pane et al. 2026, between 1960 and
2019. The subset data used in our study is archived here. The subset
dataset contains 2034477 rows and 7 columns. Each row lists (1) a unique
number associated with each grid cell, (2 and 3) the geospatial locations,
(4) the year the biotic disturbance agent was detected or (5) the one year
lag in detection (specific to bark beetle damage), (6) the biotic
disturbance agent detected, and (7) and the area of the aerially detected
disturbance. More details are contained in the README file.