Comparative Operational Performance of Baited Logs, Lure Traps, and Flight-Intercept Traps in a Province-Scale...

National and provincial surveillance of pine wood-boring pests in China is designed to detect damaging taxa, map occurrence, assess risk and loss, and support early warning, zoning and control decisions. Province-scale comparisons of alternative monitoring devices remain rare, especially under the operational conditions required by such programs in climatically and topographically heterogeneous forests. Using data from the 2025-2026 systematic survey of pine wood-boring pests in Yunnan Province, China, we integrated several monitoring datasets to compare baited logs, lure traps, and flight-intercept traps. The harmonized database comprised 2603 standard monitoring subcompartments and 3519 installed sites, including 4080 baited-log piles, 4807 lure-trap units, and 373 flight-intercept traps. Main performance analyses focused on active sites with at least one collection event (570 baited-log sites, 63 flight-intercept sites, and 496 lure-trap sites), whereas installed site summaries were retained to characterize operational coverage. Because the study was observational and the three devices have different sampling mechanisms, we interpreted detection probability as the primary early warning metric, and catch, operational taxon richness, standardized yield, and cost metrics as supporting indicators of diagnostic and operational return. Site-level comparisons were complemented with paired analyses of 21 co-located subcompartments, a more comparable subset defined within county × elevation band × host group strata represented by all three methods, county-clustered regression, and a taxonomic-resolution sensitivity analysis. Lure traps consistently had the highest detection probability (0.73), the greatest cumulative catch (8617 individuals), and the broadest operational taxonomic coverage (45 operational taxa). In county-clustered models, lure traps had higher odds of detection (odds ratio = 11.25, 95% CI: 5.64-22.43) and higher catch rates (incidence rate ratio = 5.97, 95% CI: 2.26-15.76) than baited logs after adjustment for elevation band, host group, and collection effort. The same ranking persisted in the more comparable subset and after exclusion of unresolved family-, subfamily-, genus-, and unknown-level records. Standardized yield peaked at 1500-2200 m. Scenario-based costing showed that lure traps had the lowest cost per captured and resolved captured individual, whereas detection cost estimates were interpreted together with absolute detections and operational taxonomic output. Overall, the results support a tiered surveillance architecture in which lure traps serve as the primary routine early warning tool, baited logs provide targeted complementary information, and flight-intercept traps are reserved mainly for exploratory or faunistic surveys.