N.Y. RED OAK SHOWS SIGNS OF CALIFORNIA MALADY Date: 040801
From: http://www.dailynews.com/
HAS TREE DISEASE SPREAD? By Patrick Healy, New York Times, July 30, 2004
Oyster Bay Cove, N.Y. - A botanical mystery is playing out at the
Tiffany Creek Nature Preserve, here amid rolling hills and sprawling
Long Island estates. A single red oak tree at the preserve has tested
positive for sudden oak death syndrome, a disease that ravaged forests
in California, and scientists are trying to figure out whether the
infection is a dire beginning or a false alarm.
Scientists with the U.S. Forest Service and the Department of
Agriculture are equally baffled and worried. Sudden oak death syndrome
has killed tens of thousands of trees and cost governments and plant
nurseries millions of dollars, but until now, it has only been found
in trees in Northern California and southern Oregon.
A knotty red oak tree standing in the preserve first tested positive
for the disease last month, and scientists said Wednesday that they
were running a battery of secondary DNA tests on tree samples to
determine whether the tree truly carries the debilitating bug. Tests
on trees in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire have yielded false positive
results before, said Kerry Britton, a pathologist for the Forest
Service.
"I'm still hoarding the hopes that it's not really there," Britton
said. "If it is a positive, they'll have to declare a quarantine zone
around the area and declare an eradication effort. They'll have to cut
down that tree and trees around there. It's up to the state to decide
how drastically."
Environmental officials throughout the Midwest and the East Coast
have feared an outbreak of sudden oak death syndrome ever since trees
in California began dying from the disease in the mid-1990s.
A fungus-like pathogen called Phytophthora ramorum hops from plant to
plant by riding rivulets of windblown rain, scientists said. It can
lay dormant in trees for years, and then kill them within weeks. Oaks
are not the only trees affected. The disease has killed more than a
dozen species of trees on the West Coast, and has prompted quarantines
of potentially infected plants from California.
Steven Swain, a researcher at the University of California at
Berkeley, who has studied the disease, said early tests on East Coast
oaks have shown them to be more vulnerable to the disease than trees
in the West.
"If this gets loose on the East Coast, it could cause quite a bit of
damage," Swain said.
No other trees, ferns or plants in the Tiffany Creek preserve have
tested positive for the disease.
Scientists took 60 other samples from the suspect red oak and tested
any tree within 20 acres that showed a passing sign of illness,
officials with the inspection service said. They expect the test
results next week.
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Copyright (c) 2004 Los Angeles Daily News
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Heartwood Consulting Services, LLC
Toms River, NJ
www.HeartwoodConsulting.net