murphy4trees
Addicted to ArboristSite
From a newsletter I get. Good info in Sudden Oak Death aka Oak Mortality Syndrome....
Subj: December Oak Report
Date: 12/20/2004 8:59:59 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: [email protected]
Sent from the Internet (Details)
December 2004
California Oak Report
Oak Named America's National Tree
With Congressional passage and presidential signing of a historic bill, America has an official National Tree -- the oak. Official recognition of oak as America's National Tree reflects a vote, hosted by The National Arbor Day Foundation and energetically supported by the California Oak Foundation, in which Americans of all ages and from all walks of life helped choose the country's newest national symbol. Advocates of the oak praised its diversity, with more than 60 species growing in the United States, making oaks America's most widespread of hardwoods.
“Having oak as our National Tree is in keeping with the wishes of the hundreds of thousands of people who helped choose this striking symbol of our nation's great strength,” said John Rosenow, president of The National Arbor Day Foundation. “Naming a national tree is a cause for celebration for us all.”
Sudden Oak Death Perspective
Presented below is a condensed version of an August 15, 2004 editorial by Richard A. Lovett that appeared in the Sacramento Bee. Lovett is a science writer who lives in Portland, Ore.
California Environment: How sudden oak death is transforming the state
California's oaks are dying. Not all of them and not the ones around Sacramento, but enough to raise questions about whether the Golden State's ecology is about to be wildly altered.
The problem is a blight called sudden oak death, which started cropping up in 1995 and has since killed tens of thousands of trees, mostly in the coastal mountains between Big Sur and northern Sonoma County. In places, the blight is so extensive that entire hillsides have been devastated, says David Rizzo, a plant pathologist at the University of California, Davis. The disease has also shown up in nursery trees shipped to at least 17 other states and in Europe, raising concerns that it may rapidly spread across the globe.
Sudden oak death is caused by a fungus called Phytophthora ramorum, which invades the trunks of tanoaks and coast live oaks. Tanoaks are common in redwood forests; coast live oaks are the dominant species in much of the rest of the Coast Ranges.
The name "sudden oak death" is a bit of a misnomer. The disease actually infects trees for several years, invading their trunks and causing them to ooze reddish sap that looks disturbingly like blood. Eventually, the infection spreads completely around the trunk, girdling the tree and preventing the flow of sap. That's when the tree dies. From a distance, it does appear to be sudden because until the infection cuts off the sap, the tree looks green and healthy. Then, its branches die, all at once.
One of the problems with controlling Phytophthora is that the fungus infects many plants other than oaks. Some it kills there are indications that California's madrones may also be at risk but others simply develop a grayblack mold on their foliage. These "foliar" infections don't kill the plant, but they produce vast numbers of spores that may carry the disease to more susceptible species.
To date, the infection has been patchy hitting some areas strongly, and others not at all. Rizzo believes it became established during the wet El Niño years of the early 1990s and continues to spread whenever the state gets an unusually wet winter. Thus, after the wet April of 2003, it invaded numerous new areas, including San Francisco's Angel Island State Park. But the dry spring of 2004 may have temporarily put the brakes on additional spread.
Meanwhile, scientists are scrambling to understand the disease and find ways to control it. So far, much of the news is bleak. Early this month, at a meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Portland, Ore., Letty Brown, an environmental science graduate student at UC Berkeley, reported that the infection might be even more destructive than had previously been thought.
Prior studies had found that Phytophthora infected from 4 percent to 30 percent of the coast live oak in any given patch, and from 20 percent to 70 percent of tanoak. But Brown found that up to 27 percent of the coast live oak within her study plots died in the two-year interval from 2002 to '04. (Her research focused only on coast live oak, and not the even-more-susceptible tanoak.) If you add in recently dead trees that were probably killed by sudden oak death, plus living trees showing symptoms of Phytophthora infection, the death rate in her most heavily infected plots may soon exceed 60 percent. And that's not counting any still-healthy trees that might yet succumb to the disease.
UC Berkeley ecologist Max Moritz believes that the future may not be completely bleak. In yet another study presented at the ecology meeting in Portland, he argued that controlled burns might someday play a role in preventing the spread of the disease.
Ecologists have long believed that fire suppression may play a role in making ecosystems vulnerable to disease outbreaks. The argument is that the buildup of excess vegetation forces plants to compete too strongly for light, water and nutrients, reducing their ability to fight off infection.
In seeing whether this applies to sudden oak death, Moritz compared the locations of known infected zones to those where fires have occurred since 1950. He found that infections were strongly concentrated in regions where fire had been absent.
Remarkably, he says, fires that occurred 20, 30, 40 or 50 years ago decades before the first case of sudden oak death was observed are affecting the current resistance to it.
Moritz has several hypotheses for why this might be the case. One is simply the weakening effect of dense vegetation on plants' disease resistance. But another factor is that California bay laurels (whose leaves can play host to the nonfatal form of the mold) change their chemistry as trees age. Young trees have leaves that produce large amounts of aromatic chemicals called phenols, which serve as natural antibiotics. But as the trees age, the amounts of phenols go down. Fire resets the cycle by burning out the old bay laurel and allowing disease-resistant young plants to grow in its place.
Another factor is that soil chemistry changes with the length of time since the last fire. In particular, fire increases the amount of calcium in the soil, and calcium, Moritz says, is an important factor in disease resistance.
Rizzo agrees that fire is probably an important part of the sudden oak death story, and he applauds Moritz's efforts to figure out the link. He's concerned, though, that the full story might prove to be quite complicated. His own studies, he says, have indicated that the healthiest trees are the most susceptible to infection.
"It may turn out that areas that burned 30 years ago are more resistant to invasion," he says, "but once the cat's out of the bag (i.e., the disease has become established), fire may or may not help."
People concerned about the future of California oaks point to other blights that have devastated American forests. A few decades ago, Dutch elm disease swept across the East and Midwest, demolishing trees that once shaded small-town lawns throughout the American heartland. Earlier, chestnut blight wiped out the American chestnut, previously a dominant species in the Eastern hardwood forests.
It's easy to look at these prior examples and become depressed. Who wants to lose yet another tree species? But even as he doubts that Moritz has found an easy way to control sudden oak death, Rizzo doesn't paint a totally bleak future. To begin with, he says, oaks won't go extinct. Fungicides exist that can effectively protect individual trees in backyards, nurseries and parks.
Nor will large chunks of California be denuded. Wild tanoaks might be in trouble, but coast live oak appears to be quite variable in its susceptibility to the disease: Some stands quickly sicken and die, others don't. Why the difference? "That's the $10,000 question," says Brown. Even if Moritz is right and fire plays a role, it's likely that a host of other factors are at work, as well.
The woodlands themselves will persist. Eastern forests are still green, despite the loss of elms and chestnuts. People who don't know that those trees once existed don't notice that anything is absent.
And yet, those of us who remember the elm, and who've read about the chestnut, do miss them. Let us hope that California's oaks one of the signature species of the Coast Ranges never join the elm and the chestnut on the list of things that future generations don't even know they're missing.
Subj: December Oak Report
Date: 12/20/2004 8:59:59 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: [email protected]
Sent from the Internet (Details)
December 2004
California Oak Report
Oak Named America's National Tree
With Congressional passage and presidential signing of a historic bill, America has an official National Tree -- the oak. Official recognition of oak as America's National Tree reflects a vote, hosted by The National Arbor Day Foundation and energetically supported by the California Oak Foundation, in which Americans of all ages and from all walks of life helped choose the country's newest national symbol. Advocates of the oak praised its diversity, with more than 60 species growing in the United States, making oaks America's most widespread of hardwoods.
“Having oak as our National Tree is in keeping with the wishes of the hundreds of thousands of people who helped choose this striking symbol of our nation's great strength,” said John Rosenow, president of The National Arbor Day Foundation. “Naming a national tree is a cause for celebration for us all.”
Sudden Oak Death Perspective
Presented below is a condensed version of an August 15, 2004 editorial by Richard A. Lovett that appeared in the Sacramento Bee. Lovett is a science writer who lives in Portland, Ore.
California Environment: How sudden oak death is transforming the state
California's oaks are dying. Not all of them and not the ones around Sacramento, but enough to raise questions about whether the Golden State's ecology is about to be wildly altered.
The problem is a blight called sudden oak death, which started cropping up in 1995 and has since killed tens of thousands of trees, mostly in the coastal mountains between Big Sur and northern Sonoma County. In places, the blight is so extensive that entire hillsides have been devastated, says David Rizzo, a plant pathologist at the University of California, Davis. The disease has also shown up in nursery trees shipped to at least 17 other states and in Europe, raising concerns that it may rapidly spread across the globe.
Sudden oak death is caused by a fungus called Phytophthora ramorum, which invades the trunks of tanoaks and coast live oaks. Tanoaks are common in redwood forests; coast live oaks are the dominant species in much of the rest of the Coast Ranges.
The name "sudden oak death" is a bit of a misnomer. The disease actually infects trees for several years, invading their trunks and causing them to ooze reddish sap that looks disturbingly like blood. Eventually, the infection spreads completely around the trunk, girdling the tree and preventing the flow of sap. That's when the tree dies. From a distance, it does appear to be sudden because until the infection cuts off the sap, the tree looks green and healthy. Then, its branches die, all at once.
One of the problems with controlling Phytophthora is that the fungus infects many plants other than oaks. Some it kills there are indications that California's madrones may also be at risk but others simply develop a grayblack mold on their foliage. These "foliar" infections don't kill the plant, but they produce vast numbers of spores that may carry the disease to more susceptible species.
To date, the infection has been patchy hitting some areas strongly, and others not at all. Rizzo believes it became established during the wet El Niño years of the early 1990s and continues to spread whenever the state gets an unusually wet winter. Thus, after the wet April of 2003, it invaded numerous new areas, including San Francisco's Angel Island State Park. But the dry spring of 2004 may have temporarily put the brakes on additional spread.
Meanwhile, scientists are scrambling to understand the disease and find ways to control it. So far, much of the news is bleak. Early this month, at a meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Portland, Ore., Letty Brown, an environmental science graduate student at UC Berkeley, reported that the infection might be even more destructive than had previously been thought.
Prior studies had found that Phytophthora infected from 4 percent to 30 percent of the coast live oak in any given patch, and from 20 percent to 70 percent of tanoak. But Brown found that up to 27 percent of the coast live oak within her study plots died in the two-year interval from 2002 to '04. (Her research focused only on coast live oak, and not the even-more-susceptible tanoak.) If you add in recently dead trees that were probably killed by sudden oak death, plus living trees showing symptoms of Phytophthora infection, the death rate in her most heavily infected plots may soon exceed 60 percent. And that's not counting any still-healthy trees that might yet succumb to the disease.
UC Berkeley ecologist Max Moritz believes that the future may not be completely bleak. In yet another study presented at the ecology meeting in Portland, he argued that controlled burns might someday play a role in preventing the spread of the disease.
Ecologists have long believed that fire suppression may play a role in making ecosystems vulnerable to disease outbreaks. The argument is that the buildup of excess vegetation forces plants to compete too strongly for light, water and nutrients, reducing their ability to fight off infection.
In seeing whether this applies to sudden oak death, Moritz compared the locations of known infected zones to those where fires have occurred since 1950. He found that infections were strongly concentrated in regions where fire had been absent.
Remarkably, he says, fires that occurred 20, 30, 40 or 50 years ago decades before the first case of sudden oak death was observed are affecting the current resistance to it.
Moritz has several hypotheses for why this might be the case. One is simply the weakening effect of dense vegetation on plants' disease resistance. But another factor is that California bay laurels (whose leaves can play host to the nonfatal form of the mold) change their chemistry as trees age. Young trees have leaves that produce large amounts of aromatic chemicals called phenols, which serve as natural antibiotics. But as the trees age, the amounts of phenols go down. Fire resets the cycle by burning out the old bay laurel and allowing disease-resistant young plants to grow in its place.
Another factor is that soil chemistry changes with the length of time since the last fire. In particular, fire increases the amount of calcium in the soil, and calcium, Moritz says, is an important factor in disease resistance.
Rizzo agrees that fire is probably an important part of the sudden oak death story, and he applauds Moritz's efforts to figure out the link. He's concerned, though, that the full story might prove to be quite complicated. His own studies, he says, have indicated that the healthiest trees are the most susceptible to infection.
"It may turn out that areas that burned 30 years ago are more resistant to invasion," he says, "but once the cat's out of the bag (i.e., the disease has become established), fire may or may not help."
People concerned about the future of California oaks point to other blights that have devastated American forests. A few decades ago, Dutch elm disease swept across the East and Midwest, demolishing trees that once shaded small-town lawns throughout the American heartland. Earlier, chestnut blight wiped out the American chestnut, previously a dominant species in the Eastern hardwood forests.
It's easy to look at these prior examples and become depressed. Who wants to lose yet another tree species? But even as he doubts that Moritz has found an easy way to control sudden oak death, Rizzo doesn't paint a totally bleak future. To begin with, he says, oaks won't go extinct. Fungicides exist that can effectively protect individual trees in backyards, nurseries and parks.
Nor will large chunks of California be denuded. Wild tanoaks might be in trouble, but coast live oak appears to be quite variable in its susceptibility to the disease: Some stands quickly sicken and die, others don't. Why the difference? "That's the $10,000 question," says Brown. Even if Moritz is right and fire plays a role, it's likely that a host of other factors are at work, as well.
The woodlands themselves will persist. Eastern forests are still green, despite the loss of elms and chestnuts. People who don't know that those trees once existed don't notice that anything is absent.
And yet, those of us who remember the elm, and who've read about the chestnut, do miss them. Let us hope that California's oaks one of the signature species of the Coast Ranges never join the elm and the chestnut on the list of things that future generations don't even know they're missing.
