Today I received a notification of the apparent first Maine record of butternut canker (which may not be a butternut canker at all since the bark looks kind of pine-like to me) and thought about how these blights, cankers, and diseases have spread so violently in the past half century or so. I am the curator of the project Introduced Tree Threats in Maine (which I might expand to New England or eastern North America if you tell me to), and I think about these kinds of things pretty often. Along roads, in forests, and on the ground I find signs of these problems. I have gone from seeing healthy beech trees full of nuts to being all too familiar with the green-and-yellow stripes of beech leaf disease. I see emerald ash borer traps in many nature preserves. Striped maple, and early colonizer of forests after disease, is popping up all over the place. Do you have any ideas on how to help? If the diverse forests of eastern North America are reduced to oak and maybe maple, what will the wildlife do? And without wildlife, what will we do?
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Western Cape is in the throes of polyphagous shothole borer. Losing colonial oaks, but interesting to see how our diverse indigenous trees cope.
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I remember seeing the mass die-off of pines in the California mountains.
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Emerald Ash Borer has recent appeared in western Oregon, too. There’s at least one well established population here, too big to eradicate and several other records. Oregon Ash is a dominant tree in our wetland forests – but not for long.
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