Bringing back the American chestnut

welcome to chestnut week at the pennsylvania farm show i'm jim searing president of the pennsylvania and new jersey chapter of the american chestnut foundation and i will be your host for this series which is really designed to inform and update you on the quest to save the american chestnut and to restore it to our homes our farms our fields and our forests we're featuring an array of experts on growing restoring and finding chestnuts in our region and we're really glad you joined us you know we're here at the virtual pa farm show experience uh one that you don't have to travel to this year the screen behind me is the display we bring to the farm show every year where we normally engage with thousands of people so we look forward to next year when hopefully we can see you all in person or online like we're doing now before we start our program there's just a few things housekeeping things everybody needs to know first this program is being recorded and we plan on sharing it on our on youtube and and other mediums um and that recording includes anything you put into questions and answers or the chat secondly uh for convenience and to to keep things on track we will mute everyone except for the presenters and we have set up the zoom event so that no one can see your screen and lastly we will not be surprising anybody by calling on individuals we're really here to share information so we will have time for questions after mike's presentation so if you have one please enter it in the q a box at the bottom of your screen there's also a chat section but we will not be monitoring it for questions that's what the q a box is for [Music] and with that let's get into our program we're really here because the american chestnut was one of the most important trees in the forest of the eastern united states from mississippi to maine and ontario and really foreshadowing all the destruction of trees and forests that we're seeing today the chestnut tree was almost entirely wiped out of those forests the american chestnut foundation or tacf for short was formed to save the tree as a and find a way to restore what was lost today the effort to save the american chestnut is considered one of the most ambitious ecological restoration programs in the world today's presenter is mike alcott a retired and i will say revered research scientist for the new jersey department of environmental protection he serves as an adjunct professor of chemistry at the college of new jersey mike was way ahead of his time and was hooked on chestnut trees since the fifth grade uh he's led the planting of thousands of chestnut trees in pennsylvania and new jersey and and has a research orchard in central pennsylvania mike also serves on the board of the pennsylvania new jersey chapter of tacf and with that mike welcome thank you jim um i'm not sure how revered i am a bunch of some of my former colleagues might not agree with that but i thank you and uh so let me share my screen here and um uh we'll get into what i'd like to share with you all uh i should point out that any opinions are mine not necessarily tacf's um uh but uh i think that uh what i'm about to say is quite consistent with what tacf is is working on i hope people can see my screen okay um everything look good jim and gene yeah i think so okay good all right so uh we're going to be talking about bringing back the american chestnut and as jim said there's quite a history to this and i'll try to get into some of the key aspects of that history and um oh let's see here i'm having trouble moving my uh moving my page here we go okay uh so an overview what i plan to talk about is a little run-through of the history uh and then we'll talk about new efforts to bring the tree back it was a beloved and high value tree it was a produced wonderful timber produced masked crops regularly and it was fast growing widely adapted nearly wiped out by a fungus that came into this country over 100 years ago early efforts to bring it back did not succeed our efforts now are based on a better understanding of genetics and they've pretty much focus on three aspects which are kind of described with this little acronym three b's united for restoration reading biotechnology and bio control so i'll talk about those as as well as i can here um so let's see here i'm not sure why my page down is not working too well well always these technical difficulties are so irritating when they happen um this may be a connectivity issue i'm not sure what it is um but we're we're still moving so not to worry um so these new efforts uh really can be kind of categorized as these five things the back cross breeding program the pennsylvania chestnut timber tree program um which i'm involved with it's more of an offshoot rather than a major focus of tacf but i'm going to touch on it a little bit biological control of the blight fungus and genetic engineering and then finding and propagating surviving american chestnuts so what about the history well when we think of a big tree most people think of an oak tree biggest tree that you're likely to find around but the mighty oaks of today once had a big brother and um here's a picture that was drawn in 1878 or thereabouts hunting chestnuts in fairmount park which is outside of philadelphia in philadelphia uh and uh you notice there's a little person up in the tree here trying to shake the nuts down people down below gathering the nuts we might think that uh an artist's conception would exaggerate things a little bit but let's look at some actual photos here's here's one of the tree uh in the open and you can see a little person down here so this tree is 10 feet in diameter there's another one uh the tree got big uh in the woods it grew tall some shots from the glory days of the american chestnut smoky mountains probably the heart of its range this is from bedford county which is in south central pa and you can notice here one of the aspects of the chestnut that made it so important it sprouted very rapidly from uh from stumps and you can see the the remnants of a stump here where a tree was cut and this tree has grown back and probably within 40 50 years it's produced a marketable timber again um here's some shots of some of the timber uh harvests of the chestnut um this has a little personal connection to me this workbench was in my grandfather's basement and as a kid i would go down there sometimes and see it and notice it but didn't think much of it and when my grandfather died we we took this workbench and stored it and uh you know from time to time i'd look at it piled things on top of it my son was around one time and we were looking in in the shed for something and he said hey dad you know that looks like chestnut and um so we took a closer look at it and lo and behold it is chestnut this is a workbench that belonged to my great grandfather who like my son was a woodworker and you can see this is a big big hunk of wood um it was um important uh across the state this is the percent of timber acreage that was uh chestnut in 1911 this is an interesting little book here um a picture of of a book as jim mentioned i have a little orchard of trees in north central pennsylvania and a friend of ours came over one day to see these trees and he brought a friend to his along who had a copy of this old book and i looked at it and it's got some beautiful line drawings of trees it's by joseph s ilick who went on he was the state forester of pennsylvania and he went on to become um the dean of the school of forestry at the new york school of forestry in syracuse where bill powell does his work and you'll hear more from from bill powell if you tune into the wednesday webinar but at any rate uh joseph phillip uh and this was in 1928 that this issue i was able to find one online uh wonderful old book and there's still copies of it out there but joseph s ellick said it was formerly the most common tree of pennsylvania so it was widely distributed and here's a kind of a picture of what it would have looked like when the trees were in full bloom um in an area where there were a lot of them this could be from the smokies uh a beautiful sight when the tree was in full bloom in 1904 uh in the bronx um they had there's a zoological park there it's now the bronx zoo um had all sorts of uh wonderful plants and trees and noticed this affliction of the chestnut trees um and tried to fight it by spraying the trees with a fungicide bordeaux mixture which turned them sort of a bluish-white and they hacked off affected branches uh they realized it was a real problem they did everything they could think of to try to extirpate the blight uh which had now been identified as a fungus uh it kept advancing and by 1912 um the whole east coast was uh up in arms foresters and people that were that loved the tree were very much aware that it was a major problem and um pennsylvania formed a commission on the chestnut bike they put 275 thousand dollars into an effort to stop the blight and that would be over seven million dollars today and what they planned to do was uh create a fire break across more or less the diagonal running across the appalachians because the chestnut was heavily blighted to the east of that and not so much to the west of it and they uh commissioned 200 deputies to go around to properties and identify chestnut trees and compel the owners to cut them down and burn them they wanted to destroy the chestnut in the path of the blight in the hopes that that would stop the blight in its tracks at that point and it was one of those classic uh battles between scientists and politicians politicians wanted to do something about it it's an understandable emotion and um but they were told by some of the scientists at the time it's not going to work the blight spreads by wind by birds by insects they went ahead anyway and uh probably destroyed perhaps some resistant trees in the process because they were uh landowners would be given 20 days to get rid of a tree that had been identified as a chestnut and uh by 1913 it was clear that this had not worked uh and that approach um trying to stop it with with uh a fire fire break uh was abandoned and the blight steadily spread and by the 50s it had pretty much got all the trees throughout the entire range leaving ghost forest in its aftermath tree still survives in the understory in some parts of its range um it is sprouting from the roots the roots are still alive uh they gradually lose energy over time um but these sprouts uh usually uh succumb before they're 10 or 20 feet tall and it's no longer found in some areas and this is why uh the clock is really ticking on extinction of this tree uh here's what a uh stump sprout looks like that has become blighted uh you can see this this is from the allegheny national forest you can see this tree is is dead from about this point up but it's vigorously sprouting from the roots and this is very characteristic of how the blight affects the trees a close-up of the blight fungus you see this tanker spreading under the bark and once it girdles the bark once it girdles the trunk everything above that will die this was one of my best trees a few years ago in my my orchard in northern pa and then it turned up dead and you can see it's sprouting from the roots close-up shows the blight canker this discoloration here is uh is what the blade bladed tissue looks like and uh it has girdled this tree and everything above about the here is dead and this tree will continue to survive but it will become a shrub its central stem is gone um i know there are a lot of challenges in breeding chestnuts that can survive so clearly it has to be able to tolerate the blight and i use the term tolerance and resistance more or less interchangeably here i think tolerance is probably a better word but uh i'll talk about tolerance and resistance but it has to be able to resist or tolerate the blight and it has to be able to reach the canopy uh the the tree will not bloom unless it's in full sun and if it doesn't bloom it won't produce seed here's an asian tree uh they're beautiful trees they're wonderful producers of of nuts but they grow like apple trees and so they're not going to reach the canopy of the north american forest and if they can't reach the canopy they won't get in full sun they won't bloom but there are many of many of the asian trees are strongly blight resistant and as i'll discuss in a little bit they become an important part of the effort to bring back the american chestnut um initial attempts really were abandoned back in the 30s 40s 50s people didn't really fully understand genetics even though there had been breakthroughs scientifically before that they hadn't really percolated through and most of the people working on the tree kept looking for an ideal hybrid almost analogous to the way we we might develop apple trees they were looking for an individual that had all the right characteristics that then they could propagate and and they didn't fully understand how genes segregate and recombine um and it was gregor mendel's groundbreaking work that once it became uh known uh really helped gain a better understanding of genetics that we that we have today and of course we've gone way beyond that now with with modern techniques but grendel's work was was mendel's work was very important uh rediscovered in the 1900s he was an austrian monk he did lots of work meticulous research with peas looking at traits and how they were inherited but he published in a rather obscure scientific journal and he was outside of the mainstream of science and he was largely ignored until the early 1900s the basics of his findings are are illustrated by the gene for eye color and i bear with me a little bit some of you this will be review but i want to give you a little a little brief little run through of mendelian genetics as illustrated by eye color in the case of eye color uh it's basically controlled essentially by one gene and we can think of uh that gene as being either a big b or a little b if it's a big b uh the the person will have brown eyes because uh each gene has really two l alleles and uh we would have uh either a big b and a big b or a big b and a little b or a little b and a little b and in reproduction uh these genes uh separate and then recombine and if both alleles are the same we say the genotype is homozygous if they're different we say it's heterozygous in the case of eye color the phenotype is what we observe and that's either blue or brown now let's say that you have a parent who um is homozygous with the big b that person will have brown eyes and a parent who is homozygous for uh the little b will have blue eyes and all the offspring of those two parents will have brown eyes because big b is dominant in the case of eye color uh but if you have two parents who each of which are heterozygous they all have brown eyes but when these genes recombine about a quarter of the the children are likely to have blue eyes because the recessive gene has uh doubled up in the case of uh as you can see with this matrix uh these are called punnett squares and so now if we have um a heterozygous brown eyed parent and a homozygous blue-eyed parent about half the offspring will have blue eyes and of course mendel's work was done with peas but it was the same principle and this uh understanding led to um the back cross breeding program of the american chestnut foundation and the idea has been to cross asian and american trees and then repeatedly cross successive generations with american trees to increase the american component while retaining the asian genes for blight resistance and you can sort of picture the process this way we start with a asian and an american cross and that first generation is half asian half american uh then we cross that with an american those off those that first generation and then we take the offspring of those of that cross and cross it them again with the american and we do that three times at which point we have a b3 a back cross iii tree that's mostly american 1 16 of its genome is chinese or japanese and hopefully that 1 16 has all the resistance for blight genes within it and then we take we do another step which is called inter-crossing uh where we cross those back cross trees with themselves with each other with similar trees and the idea there is to double up on the blight resistant blight tolerant genes and if the process looks kind of like this you start with a blight tolerant resistant asian tree cross it with a non-resistant american the first generation all has a big r for resistant and a little r for non-resistant unlike the case with eye color um these trees are all moderate in resistance the resistance gene is not dominant so all these first generation hybrids have moderately they're moderately intermediate blight resistance which means they can survive for a while but they'll probably succumb to the blight we then take those um if we and one of the keys here is um successfully separating out of those trees that that have this uh that all have this genotype we want to separate out and and make sure we select those that are strongly blight resistant and then take those trees and cross them with an american and again select carefully to make sure that we've got the resistant offspring and do that repeatedly and eventually take those hopefully very resistant but largely american trees cross them with identical trees and trees with the same genetic background and there we get a doubling of the resistance factor and so the idea is now we've got a tree that's largely american but it's got that strong light resistance um so this has been the plan and it was developed in the early 1980s and it has led to this this huge uh effort by many many volunteers that jim alluded to probably the largest volunteer science organization in the world it may very well be thousands of members trees planted all over the place uh many people have spent much time and energy working on this um chestnut foundation has a research center in meadowview it's got a major presence at penn state um lots and lots of work has gone into this and it's been ongoing for about 30 years and one of the things that you realize when you get involved with this work is that it's clearly multi-generational i will not live to see the ultimate success of this program and i i dare say most of us involved may not so it's important to keep young people involved and and extend this work on into the future it's been a long process it takes about eight years before a tree uh is ready to reproduce and there's other factors involved uh differing strains of the blight fungus other pathogens um environmental factors and the genetics are more complicated as we've now learned in the early 80s it was thought there were two genes involved in blight tolerance and obviously that complicates things quite a bit but by the 1990s it looked like there were three genes involved so if each one was a different color you'd have it you might have a genotype sort of like this but now we're we're have found out that there are nine or more areas of the chestnut genome that are involved in blight resistance and if all or most of these regions are important the chances of the back crossing approach producing a fully blight resistant tree are vanishingly small um what we do see uh this is kind of a picture of um how it looks this would be an american purely american tree that's been hammered repeatedly by the blight and it's turned in essentially into a shrub uh it keeps sprouting from the roots but um it's not going to make a central stem that could reach the canopy of any forest here's a pretty good example of a back cross hybrid it's definitely afflicted by the blight you can see where the bark is cankered but it's surviving and here's a first generation hybrid uh probably more black resistant on average than even uh most of the back cross hybrids so far brings us to the second of the new efforts and this is the pennsylvania chestnut timber tree program that uh that i'm happy to be involved with um and this goes directly to the inter-crossing stage and this was started through the work of the late great dave armstrong uh and uh dr bob lethal they crossed a bunch of surviving americans with asian trees and planted them and the idea is that you you don't try to back cross you just go right to this inner crossing stage and if three genes are involved some of the second generation hybrids should be more blight tolerant than either parent and if you cross them with each other again some will will get become strongly blade tolerant these trees uh the most the oldest orchard of these have now been tested have been inoculated with blight and we'll see how well they do the results are still not clear yet if they show strong blight tolerance and timber type growth then they can be selected and uh produce nuts uh in the f3 and perhaps f4 orchards here's sarah simmons and if you uh have a chance to hear sarah on thursday i highly recommend it this is when she visited our orchard in north central pa here's one of my better trees this is a japanese american hybrid this was taken over a year ago and unfortunately this tree is starting to show what i think are signs of blight um we'll see uh here's a picture of the one of the plantings and it's a motley crew um their jeans are scrambled these are second generation hybrids and uh um here's a tree that's become blighted uh here's another one that doesn't look too good i'm not sure what's afflicting this tree but some of them look very good this is a hybrid seems to have that upright growth habit that we want uh with with a chestnut and so far so good so we'll see how this goes the third of the new efforts is the biological control of the blade fungus and uh the fungus has its own pathogens and parasites and uh um introducing um this uh these these pathogens with a a virus that uh affects the fungus has succeeded in europe to to a large degree and in michigan where there's a large commercial chestnut presence it has not worked well in most of the u.s and that's probably because there are too many varieties of the blight fungus you can learn a lot more about this effort if you catch the chestnut chat which is happening friday and there's a little bit of an overlap with one of our farmweek or chestnut week presentations but these are all going to be recorded so uh you could catch this chestnut chat you'll hear amy matheny of west virginia university where they're doing a lot of work on hypo virulence the fourth of these new efforts that i want to discuss is genetic engineering as my colleague rex parker and i discuss in an article that we were very happy to have published this past spring in conservation biology we we pointed out and and rex is a uh retired pharmaceutical researcher uh genetic engineering has been used for over 40 years to develop medicines and other treatments that are important to human health and this has met with little or no outcry and it's in part because we consider human health important enough to have the benefits that the best that science can offer and we're arguing that it's time to try to take that same view uh towards um genetic engineering in an effort to improve forest health because at the final analysis our health depends on the forest's health and we're all interconnected in the ecology of the world um there are some differences uh genetic engineering for a tree has to enter the germ line it has to be something that can be inherited because you can't treat trees individually the same way we we treat ourselves individually uh so there are some differences but we we are arguing that um that there's a strong overlap and genetic engineering should be given um a good look a good a good fresh look for when it comes to forest health uh so what's been done and you know if you if you catch bill powell's talk dr bill powell on wednesday as part of this series you'll learn much more about this but it's been found that the blade fungus uh excretes oxalic acid which is what kills the tree and they've succeeded in introducing a gene from the wheat plant that enables the tree to produce the enzyme oxalate oxidase which speeds up this naturally occurring process of denaturing oxalic acid this happens naturally but it happens too slowly to protect a tree from the onslaught of the fungus that is excreting oxalic acid so with this gene the tree has a chance to denature that oxalic acid and it can coexist with the fungus this gene is present in many food plants it's not new in our diet the method of introducing it using agrobacterium has appears to have been naturally created in many transgenic plants and this is an interesting article that just came out where they found lots of examples of that it doesn't seem to the best we can tell to produce trees that are any different from the original american except for that wheat plant gene here's dr powell in his lab uh here's an a little picture of one of the earlier um gene trees that had that gene in it and you can see that there's a good reason to think that these trees are quite blight resistant here's three different seedlings groups of seedlings that have been uh inoculated with the fungus the american chestnuts just wilt right down the chinese have some resistance but they they take a hit these genetically engineered trees seem to be able to withstand it it's now undergoing review by the usda if it's approved for public release pollen from these resistant trees could be used to pollinate regionally adapted surviving american trees and uh this is a added function gene and and those types of genes are are often dominant and so it's likely that 50 of the offspring would inherit this strong blade tolerance and again you can catch dr powell's talk uh this coming wednesday where you'll learn a lot more about this whole effort there's other genetic related research underway the tacf is trying to get a better sense of what genes are involved with regional adaptation uh and also seeing if we can find the genes that actually cause light resistance in the asian trees and also also there's another fungus disease that is affecting has historically affected the chestnut in in some parts of its range uh that causes a root rot so hopefully that can be um discovered too learning how uh what genes control what aspect of of a plant and an animal are it's becoming more and more feasible to do this and it may be possible to develop so-called cisgenic trees that have the same genes that are uh present in asian trees uh and the last but not the least of the new efforts is finding and propagating surviving american chestnuts and why would we do this well we want to preserve this germplasm that they have these uh these trees have have have very valuable dna uh that could be useful in the future and there's also just learning about how they grow and and watching them grow is is important and they do produce nuts and there are surviving trees out there what do you look for if you're looking for a surviving american well you got to realize that you don't want to find you know the chinese and this is a chinese tree and this is a japanese trees leaf and this is a european trees leaf there's a fair amount of these trees uh here and there in the woods what you're looking for is an american and this is what its leaf looks like um this is a photograph of um some great friends of mine uh that i was happy and honored to be part of uh in a little effort a couple years ago where we went into the woods in north central pennsylvania in the allegheny national forest to look for trees and we'd heard that there were some areas there where there were surviving americans and uh so uh scott um linford who's a wonderful musician and turns out to be uh very good at navigating in the woods and uh megan bartlett who is now at uh uc davis uh she's uh an expert in uh in grapevine culture and in how trees and plants resist drought she heads up the bartlett lab at uc davis but when we were here she just completed her post-doc work uh and they came up to our little cabin uh in northern pa and along with betsy murtha who also came up and and we went into the woods before we went out there megan had was looking around at the some of the trees near our cabin and she said mothers it looks like there's chestnuts all over here and i had to say no those are are beech trees um and once megan was locked into what american chestnut looks like she of course became very good at finding them and i think this tree is the first one that we found and i think it was megan that said i found one and uh of course it was a well-photographed little tree some uh other trees and leaves can fool you and clearly the beech tree the american beach it's a cousin of the chestnut looks a lot like it but it's bark is the giveaway it's got silvery gray bark uh chestnut oak looks a lot like the chestnut grows in many of the same types of areas but it doesn't have those pointy teeth of the chestnut beef uh the jacob and oak is also it also can fool you uh if you see acorns around you know that it's not a chestnut uh here's what we're looking for the american chestnut the leaves have a look almost like a breaking wave uh and they're often very long and and they have this little curly pointy tip on them here's what the tree looks like when it's in bloom uh and this is actually a good time of year to look for them because they hold their leaves um like an oak tree uh this is an american chestnut in in the woods um this picture was was taken by betsy martha and here's another one uh interestingly the beach trees from a distance can fool you in the winter also uh this is a beech tree and the leaves are a little more papery a slightly different color not as crinkled here's a chestnut tree um if you find any of these look up because you're in the neighborhood of an american chestnut these are old catkins if you're walking in the woods in july or august or september and you see any of these on the ground there's a chestnut nearby uh also if you find old burrs there's a chestnut nearby uh if you find some green birds like this you're in luck because these are the type of burr the appearance that they have when they have fertile nuts in them i don't know if i mentioned this but the chestnut is not self-fertile if a tree is all by itself it won't produce fertile nuts it has to be pollinated by another tree uh unpollinated nuts are small and thin pollinated nuts are filled out uh and if you those burrs uh when they open uh they'll reveal the nuts inside uh they will open by themselves but it's you don't wanna handle these things without gloves on here's a fertile nut and a couple infertile ones i was lucky and found a bunch of fertile nuts from a tree in the allegheny national forest and these have been planted will be planted and hopefully they will some of them will survive for quite a while um more on how to find them lake graboski uh is giving a talk this friday he's very good at finding these trees catch lakes talk uh if you want to know more on how to find these trees here's some pictures of survivors this is a famous one in virginia uh in the early 2000s dave armstrong and bob leffel got pollen from this tree and pollinated a surviving american near harrisburg and they produced a bunch of they collected the nuts from that tree and and dave uh planted them at uh an orchard in cadaurus and so there's a large orchard of uh surviving americans that is is now uh producing nuts at kedora state park uh here's a train near uh merrell creek reservoir in central new jersey uh that you can get a pretty good look at its bark uh here's another one this was found by my friend a fairfax cutter who's another very good finder of chestnuts she has a knack for spotting them this is in the bald paper mountain in the ted styles preserve in central new jersey uh here's one in the allegheny national forest you can see this i took this picture when it was in full bloom they have a majestic quality to them here's another one unfortunately this tree is starting to get blighted uh you can see that portion is dead but this tree produced a lot of nuts this year uh this is a tree in near genesee pa and the owner of this property uh lives in an old farmhouse on the property which all the trim is is beautiful chestnut uh this tree's been around for a while it gets blighted dives back grows back and it produces nuts and most of them are not pollinated but some of them are and i'm happy to have some of them growing at my place in potter county and interestingly there's a little inadvertent experiment this spring this this fall i should say on september 13th we had a a very cold night it got down to 23 degrees and that's a killing frost and sure enough most of my chestnut trees had their leaves uh seriously burned back by that frost these trees will they should come back in the spring but uh they weren't able to withstand uh the frost but the progeny of this tree uh was un unfazed by the frost that this is a cold tolerant tree it's from uh from uh northern pa at about 2400 feet elevation and this is an example of the regional adaptation that is important with this tree and that's why we need to find these survivors uh here's one near french creek state in french creek state park near redding here's one uh richard gramlich told me about this one and uh went to see it good look at the bark here this is in hickory run state park and you're in the pocono region you can see it's growing from an old stump and i'm afraid this tree is starting to get a little blighted and it's also all by itself so it's not producing uh fertile nuts um these trees and thanks to art metzger for this photo these are in curtailing idaho and this is way outside the range of the chestnut and these are probably 100 years old the blight has not found them yet the blight hasn't made it across the rockies these trees have not been affected by the blade you won't see trees like this in the eastern forests they simply don't get this big uh and as as my friend megan bartlett has has hypothesized today even though the chestnut was widely adapted you mostly find it in high dry ridge tops and fairly harsh environments and this could be because the tree is better adapted to those than other trees and so even hampered by the blight it still can survive there it could be because the blight itself doesn't do well in those types of environments but we won't see trees like this for a long time but with luck if our work goes well once again we'll we'll see chestnuts like this in the eastern forest summary it's a high value tree reliable nut producer fast growing nearly wiped out new efforts to bring it back include these pro programs that i went through and for more information on these um catch some of these webinars webinars later on this week um and here's some resources and this this presentation will be recorded so you can grab these uh from the recording and i think the this presentation will probably be posted as well so you'll be able to get these links but you can find them by googling google ted talks with bill powell for some very good ted talks these are a couple of wonderful books i recommend both of them and what else can you do learn more always worth doing join panj tacf find some surviving trees they're out there uh and thank you very much it's been fun i'm glad to be able to share this with you and uh everybody keep on keeping on stay well uh jim i'm turning it back to you okay sure thank you mike thank you very much for covering so much in a tight time frame i one of the things i just want to share is is uh yes the the tree loves the ridge tops of the appalachian mountains and really that's that's kind of uh chestnut central but the surprises have been many uh there's there's chestnuts american chestnuts growing near sandy hook new jersey uh there's there's chestnuts uh growing in uh sparta mountain which is northern new jersey and i i think of new jersey as the one of the most densely populated states and they're there in various little pockets or or some of these trees as well as all through central pennsylvania mike several years ago you did a presentation about climate change that included this message getting beyond the hopelessness and in many ways that sums up what the members volunteers and professionals at the american chestnut foundation are doing staying positive and making a difference by working together if any of our listeners today would like to join us at the american chestnut foundation go to www.acf.org and click on the membership tab this year our chapters has thrown in one incentive any new members who join the chapter in january will automatically be entered in a drawing to win six pints of ice cream of your choice from the penn state berkey creamery that creamery is located about two minutes from our headquarters office at penn state and when people visit with us they usually find their way over there so now it's time to uh take some questions and i say we have some already mike i'm going to ask a central one and that is given you know some of the blight blight issues with american chestnut why would people uh plant uh wild-type american chestnuts these days well it's fun to watch them grow number one um i guess i don't know if that's number one but uh it's certainly one reason but i think that if we do succeed in getting approval for the genetically engineered tree uh these surviving americans that are regionally adapted become very important because the the genetically engineered trees are all clones and we're not going to be able to bring the tree back with a clone uh it's gonna have to be crossed with um another tree and and that way you'll get those regionally uh adaptive characteristics uh like ability to tolerate a cold snap in the middle of december excuse me september um you know so so these local locally adapted american trees are are potentially very important uh going forward okay and they also will produce nuts they'll grow to a certain size they may live 20 or 30 years you know and and they'll they'll be a food for wildlife and and they're an educational opportunity for for kids and okay yeah all of us all of us so um nathan uh who's a graduate of the stockbridge school of art of agriculture and amherst had a question and he was wondering what type of apprehensions or i'll say that that our community might have about bringing back such a prominent or maybe you know such a dominant species uh and maybe another way to look at it is what kind of risks are out there yeah and specifically he was asking about northeastern ecology impacts well i guess several things about that um uh the chestnut was clearly dominant in many areas but it probably at least in part and maybe to a large degree because of rampant logging that took place in the 1800s they used to go in and clear-cut an entire forest and and many of much of the east had been clear-cut uh by 1900 uh and the chestnut grows back from a cutting better than most trees so you clear-cut an area of forest you're encouraging the chestnut and in the in the original forest before european settlers uh the chestnut was probably not all that dominant in many areas um so it's not like we're unleashing uh an invasive it's it's a native tree uh and it it doesn't spread very rapidly there have been some studies where they looked at the rate of spread of trees northward after the last glaciation during the the last glacier um trees and other plants were pushed down into uh refuge areas near the in the southern part of this continent near the gulf of mexico and lower mississippi when the glaciers receded these trees spread north and oaks and elms and maples spread much faster than the chestnut the chestnut probably didn't arrive in the northeast until about 2000 years ago because it spread it needs squirrels and blue jays and other animals to spread its seed it's not self-fertile it's going to if it be if we have a blade resistant blight tolerant tree it's going to gradually reestablish its place in the forest it's not going to become uh a weed of any sort so i don't think that's too much of a concern it's it's a it's a something worth worth looking at but i think it's been studied enough to to be confident that it's not it's not going to be a problem it's it's probably going to make the forest more resilient because it was an important part of the the forest uh and and um for wildlife uh and and uh it probably you know it will be again yes hopefully um hey so ryan asked uh a number of people of asking questions similar vane if we find surviving nut-bearing chestnuts with tacf like like us to let them know and send coordinates oh definitely yes um and there's a whole procedure um that uh if you go on to tc tacf's website you can see there's a form for um reporting a tree that you've found uh and today a people we're encouraged to use an app called tree snap uh where you it works on your cell phone you can take a picture of the tree it gives the coordinates uh latin long etc but yes the uh the foundation is very interested in knowing about these trees that they're important and particularly if they are not producing absolutely yeah so happy hunting yes yeah uh one of the things experiences i've had is driving around in june and slamming on the brakes when i see a uh what what a new to me chestnut tree in bloom you know with those white creamy white flowers it's the last tree really to bloom um the bees love it um but so many of them turn out to be chinese sure and there's nothing i mean that's fine but like we're always in search of americans but it's always good to know where the chinese and european ones are but um uh so the first question i guess is do chinese maybe from a winter perspective do the chinese trees and other introduce other chestnut trees uh hold on to their leaves in the winter yes yes they do yeah they look very similar yeah particularly when they're young and i think that's true of oaks and beaches as well when the trees are young they seem to hold on to their leaves longer but yeah i have a couple chinese trees here in my yard in new jersey they're holding on to the leaves okay and then if if you find a tree how would you distinguish i mean you showed some examples um since the chinese seem to be the more prevalent yeah chestnut true here how would is there a quick way to make it just to make a determination oh well you know not uh there's several things to look for the chinese trees tend to grow like apple trees they're they're going to be broadly spreading kind of twisted looking trunks a lot like an apple tree the leaves are different once you you get sort of locked in on the differences and i would encourage people go to the website look at some of these pictures you'll recognize the difference and sometimes it's hard to tell because there are some hybrids out there if you find a large healthy tree particularly in an area where there are a lot of human activity it was probably planted and it's probably an asian tree if it's large and healthy the americans that i've found have been in in mostly in uh in woods that are fairly undisturbed um that's kind of where you want to look for uh an american chestnut okay all right thank you well i think we've there are more questions and uh we'll we'll try to find a way to answer them uh for you um there's just no well a whole flood of new questions are coming in right now uh to respect your time i think we we wanted to keep this to an hour so we've really reached the end of today's session thank you mike for a fascinating discussion and my pleasure very strong overview please uh join us all uh each each weekday this week at 12 o'clock we'll have a different topic all about all things chestnut tomorrow we're going to talk about growing and processing chestnuts wednesday we'll be hearing from dr powell who's done the really come up with a blight tolerant tree uh that really could answer a lot of the issues that we're working through thursday sir our our own sarah fitzsimmons we'll be discussing both growing aspects of growing trees and also the restoration of the tree and then we'll be hearing from chestnut grower president uh roger blackwell on thursday night at seven and uh lake roboski will have a lot on on friday we'll have a lot more about finding and cataloging american chestnuts in the wild on behalf of the pennsylvania new jersey chapter of the american chestnut foundation we really appreciate all your interest support and questions and more information is available at www.pa njtacf.org thank you and we hope you will consider joining with us to save and restore the american chestnut have a good day you

Channel: PA NJ Chapter of TACF

Views: 36,985

Keywords:

Id: 7iniAlk0OZo

Length: 59min 22sec (3562 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 12 2021