Project in brief

A great amount of the World cultural heritage is made of natural materials, like wood and silk. But natural materials deteriorate easily, especially due to insect pest attacks. Wood borers and cloth moths feed on these materials and increase the likelihood of other biological attacks. Prevention is the only way to avoid complete loss of invaluable artifacts.
The aim of BACH (Biotremology for the conservation of Art and Cultural Heritage) is to protect the tangible human cultural heritage by developing sustainable pest management strategies based on biotremology, the study of how vibrational cues and signals affect animal behavior.
Biotremology methodologies, sound analysis approaches, and computational models will be used together to fill the knowledge gap on the role of vibrations in the behavior of two model species, the furniture beetle Anobium punctatum and the cloth moth Tineola bisselliella, and to manipulate their noxious behaviors.
In contrast to the actual management strategies, the vibrational-based strategies that will be developed will reduce to zero the risks for human and environmental health and prevent infestations, and thus irretrievable damage to cultural heritage by providing active protection. In particular, the results of BACH will help gain deeper knowledge of how living organisms rely on substrate-borne vibrations to communicate and to acquire information from the environment; while, on the long term, the project’s results will be instrumental to reach goals of high impact for the scientific community and for society as a whole, improving the current technologies for the
conservation of wood and textile, which encompass a significant portion of humanity's cultural heritage.

Project objectives

• To fill the basic knowledge gap by defining the role of vibrational stimuli in the behavioral ecology of two key insect groups, Lepidoptera and Coleoptera, which have been overlooked in biotremology so far;

• To develop a pest management strategy based on continuous vibrations’ detection, multi- modal traps and deterrent vibrations;

• To foster knowledge sharing by bridging the gap between science and cultural studies.

Impact

Despite recent advances in biotremology, vibrational communication in many insect orders remains understudied. By opening the field of biotremology to urban pests, the scientific community will benefit from the answers to basic biological questions, while paving the way to pest management applications that will benefit human and environmental health, technology advances, and culture preservation.
Ecosystems will benefit by the reduced use of insecticides and by an increased knowledge in insect groups that can be transferred to keystone species for biodiversity, like xylophagous insects in forests.
A direct societal impact will be improvement of the life quality by tackling pests threatening cultural heritage and household nuisances. It will also raise public and expert awareness, involving citizens in conservation efforts and reinforcing the role of conservation institutes.

Funding

Fondo Italiano per la Scienza 2024 – 2025 (BANDO FIS 3) - Decreto Direttoriale n. 1802 del 21-11-2024.

Team

Rachele Nieri, PI