A couple of miles outside Virserum in Kalmar County, Kraskögle Nature Reserve is located. An area with large populations of both spruce and pine, hazelnut and a lot of deciduous forest. Robert Alm is on site to clean up the adjacent land and he thinks that the nature reserve acts as a kind of "nursery" for the spruce bark drill and makes it easier to spread to areas next to it.

- Something terrible is thriving in this. The consequence is that there will be no spruce on the private land in ten years, which is older than 20 years, says Robert Alm.

Clear traces from the spruce bark

There are clear marks on the trunks of the trees where the border to the nature reserve goes. On the reserve side, the forest grows dense, mostly coniferous forest. On the other hand, Robert has cleared in a forest for a landowner who is desperate for what it looks like - here are large trunks with clear traces of spruce bark that have spread across the "border".

- I am a landowner myself and I do not want a nature reserve as the nearest neighbor. Those who own forests down here are despairing, in a few years the reserve in here will be quite brown and the rest will be cozy, says Robert Alm.

The County Administrative Board does not agree that the problem is particularly large

But that nature reserves would function as a "nursery" for the spruce bark drill does not agree with the County Administrative Board.

- That it should be so is not something we believe in. On the one hand, the nature reserve is a very small part of the landscape, here we have more mixed stocks and other types of trees and then we have the opportunity to have natural enemies that thrive and can kill the bark drills. The woodpecker is such a natural enemy and parasite crab, says Martin Sjödahl, environmental director at the County Administrative Board of Kronoberg.