interspersed with gray trunks of giant chestnut trees, killed by the
chestnut blight.
The abundance of deer has increased throughout the eastern United States since the
chestnut blight pandemic due to hunting regulations and changes in land use (McShea and Healy, 2002), and studies have shown that deer negatively affect the abundance of oak seedlings and saplings (Stange and Shea, 1998; Rooney, 2003; Russel, 2001).
The CCC has also developed methods for taking cuttings from live trees in order to maintain a living library of the genetic diversity found in Canada's remaining chestnuts, some of which show signs of natural resistance to
chestnut blight.
Chestnut blight, a fungus that originated in Asia, was first noted in the United States in 1904 at the New York Zoological Garden.
William Powell's lab is investigating the genes that offer resistance to the
chestnut blight.
Chestnut blight (Cyphonectria parasitica) and Dutch elm disease (Ophiostoma ulmi), are two other well known invasive tree diseases that have devastated the American chestnut and the American elm, effectively eliminating them as significant components of the deciduous forests of south eastern Canada.
Graban added that chestnut no longer exists as a commercial timber in the United States because of the
chestnut blight that devastated domestic supplies.
The first is
Chestnut blight caused by a fungus from Asia that was accidentally introduced into the Eastern U.
He's working on a new book on how epidemic diseases of plants, such as
chestnut blight, Dutch elm disease, and coffee rust, have reshaped the planet.
Ever since
chestnut blight was first described at the Bronx Zoo in 1904, scientists have been struggling to defeat it.
These results are important to reintroducing the tree back into the forests and to fighting off the
chestnut blight.
It offers brief looks at large-scale timbering, forest conservation and the parks movement, and watershed protection (power generation, flood control, and the negative impact of TVA and Corps of Engineers dams on river ecosystems), and finally discussion of the
chestnut blight as emblematic of a threatened forest and forest-based culture.
