As many of you probably know, cypress wood has incredibly raised its price due to infestations in the last 20 years or so. It is infestation by Seiridium cardinale, a fungus. It’s now impossible to find neat cypress wood at a very high price: you only can find it at astronomical price. Say more than 10,000.00 euros per cubic meter. A great campaign of new implantation of cypresses has been done but the cypress has a slow growth.
Now there is another infestation which hits the Alps spruce: Trentino, Val di Fiemme, it’s the famous Stradivari spruce. Bostrico / Foreste in Trentino / Foreste / Homepage - Servizio Foreste e Servizio Faunistico (in Italian, sorry). It’s an insect named Ips Typographus (in Italian: Bostrico Tipografo): Ips typographus - Wikipedia.
In 2018 a tempest named Vaia destroyed millions of cubic meters of trees up there and created the climatic conditions for the Typographus to prosperate.
I have no updated price lists of soundboard-quality spruce so I don’t know if this plague has risen the prices, I hope not.
The plague is not over yet. It has reached a new peak during last summer (2023). Fortunately, it seems that a good part of the wood is still salvageable even from an attacked and dead tree.
Here another description of the plague, with a picture of the unsalvageable wood: Vaia e Bostrico