President Franklin D. Roosevelt once said that, “Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.” Sadly, a new study paints a frightening picture. Our nation’s trees are in dire straits. Why? Well, they face threats from invasive species, deadly disease, and climate change, among other things.
Environmental workers are taking extreme measures to keep trees healthy. They are injecting them with helpful substances to keep them alive. With drills, pesticides and hard work, they are hoping to stop a tiny beetle from finishing off an ash tree in the Blue Ridge Mountains of the Appalachian Trees. The tree is about one of one hundred tree species that are deemed at risk of extinction in the US alone.
Wow!
In this location, parts of the forest are in real trouble. Not all of them can be saved. Scientists and land managers are desperately working to conserve what’s left. Ron Hughes, a land manager, and Johnny Townsend, a botanist for the state of Virginia, are walking through the forest, trying to save as many trees as they can. However, they find more dead ash trees than healthy ones. It’s disheartening.
As Johnny Townsend says, “At least visually for a person who comes around and knew the place as they once did. They’re going to see about half of the trees gone that they knew.”
It wasn’t too long ago that you couldn’t see the sky under the canopy of trees in this forest. Now, there are gaping holes in the tree canopy because this forest’s black and white ash trees are under attack from the emerald ash borer beetle.
Johnny goes on to report that the emerald ash borer, over the last six of seven years, has killed many trees. As he says, “Where the spores been, the trees have died and either fallen down or they’re standing sort of skeletons.”
You can see where the borers have been. The larvae actually go inside under the bark and form what researchers call ‘galleries’. The galleries are sort of U-shaped “squiggles” that form inside the tree. They gouge out “just enough of the growing layer in the nutrient layer of a tree that they choke it off. Essentially the tree dies of starvation.
Of course, the emerald oak is not the only tree in the United States that is in trouble. Without trees, our ecosystems are broken and not easily repaired (if at all.) Wesley Knapp, the chief botanist for NatureServe, a nonprofit whose extensive database of trees helped contribute to a new sweeping assessment of the state of native trees in the US, says, “We had to first come to consensus on what trees are and we landed on 881 species of trees. So there’s quite a diverse group of organisms. Because each species tells its own tale and interacts in nature in its own unique ways.”
The study found was that 11 to 16 percent of our native trees are in danger of extinction. The main causes of this dire situation are invasive species and disease, followed by climate change, severe weather, logging, and agriculture. Murphy Westwood of Chicago’s Morton Arboretum spent the last five years working on this first of its kind study.
He adds, “Before this report came out we didn’t really have a strong understanding of the state of the country’s trees and their risk of extinction. I mean, imagine a forest without a tree. Trees are also important to our everyday lives. They improve our air quality, they capture stormwater, they capture carbon, so they’re a very strong and powerful nature-based solution to the climate change crisis that we’re facing.”
Trees also have other value including cultural and spiritual value. It’s well-known that they can increase the value of your property. They also make our cities cooler and with temperatures on the rise due to climate change, we need all the help from trees that we can get.
Many of the tree species identified as most at risk are in the southern U.S., Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Texas, and out west in California. Many are recognizable species such as Hawthorne, oak, and pine, among others. This, of course, our conversation back to the struggling ash tree. As the researchers, trekked deeper into the forest off the trail and through streams, they found one of the largest living black ash trees in the forest. They wondered if the threat posed came just from insects or was climate change also a factor.
Ron Hughes, from the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources, says, “A species like this which is actually a northern species and survives in a few places in Virginia where the climate is just right and that means a little cooler, should be okay. However, when you start getting increases in temperature, then you start affecting that plant that likes a different climate. When you get a tree that is a very integral component of a forest and it goes away, you have a disruption in the whole system. And there are microclimate changes that happen when you open a part of the canopy up.”
The sad fact is that, in the 20 years since the emerald ash borer made its first appearance in the U.S., it’s destroyed tens of millions of trees in 30 states. Wesley Knapp bemoans the fact that we need to prioritize our “limited resources,” adding that he’s “very concerned about prioritization.” However, he’s also “very hopeful that something that seems like maybe an academic exercise to figure out what the rare trees are, will yield on the ground meaningful conservation action.”
We hope so too. Did you enjoy this article? Great! We love bringing you environmental and tree news you can use from across the globe each and every week. Remember – we’re still dealing with a backlog from the unprecedented ice storm in February. We will handle your requests for service as soon as we are able to. As always, we appreciate your patience and support of our business.
