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TACF state chapter president Jack Rogers and Dr. Karrie Ann Fadroski of the UNG Biology department are working to neutralize the dual threats of chestnut blight and root rot.
The American Chestnut Foundation has teamed up with the University of North Georgia Biology department and the UNG Environmental Leadership Center as part of a nationwide effort to restore the American chestnut tree to a place of prominence in the forests of North Georgia.
In order to develop solutions to the twin problems of chestnut blight and root rot, a volunteer force consisting of UNG students and interested members of the public established an orchard of 95 trees last fall on the university’s Hurricane Creek property, located on Dawsonville Highway just past Pine Valley.
Jack Rogers, the Georgia state chapter president of The American Chestnut Foundation (TACF), and Dr. Karrie Ann Fadroski, of the UNG Biology department, met with The Nugget recently at the Hurricane Creek site to discuss the origin of their collaborative effort, the early results they have obtained, and future plans for the operation.
Rogers began by explaining that the American chestnut used to be considered a keystone tree species in the country, and it comprised 25 percent of Appalachian forests.
“A hundred years ago or so, the American Chestnut would have been the dominant hardwood all the way up the Eastern seaboard … It was a tall, forest canopy tree. Very rot-resistant wood, fast-growing, and it produced an amazing amount of high-protein nuts. It was a very reliable source of food for mammals,” Rogers said.
Fadroski added that because the nut didn’t rot during the winter, they created a lasting food supply.
Rogers noted that early 20th century subsistent farmers heavily depended on harvesting nuts and timber from chestnut trees to sell.
CHESTNUT BLIGHT
Unfortunately, a fungal pathogen known as chestnut blight was introduced to the United States from Asia in the 1930s. When a chestnut reaches a height of 15-20 feet, the blight infects the bark of the tree and will typically kill it in two to three years.
“The tree gets what’s called a canker; it goes all the way around and girdles the tree, and the tree dies and falls over. And in 30-40 years they estimate that four to five billion American chestnuts were killed. It’s really hard to wrap your head around what an incredible, sudden change it was to the ecosystem of the entire Appalachian Mountains. It’s just amazing,” Rogers said.
If there is a silver lining to the chestnut blight, it is that the disease only kills the trees from the ground up. When a stricken tree dies and fall over, the chestnut will re-sprout from the roots, albeit still contaminated. It will grow back to the same modest height before succumbing to the disease, at which point the whole process begins again.
“So the good news is, because we’re trying to bring the chestnut back, we have access to lots and lots of the genetic material. The trees are still here, they’re just functionally extinct. The reason they say that is the trees never typically get big enough to get enough sun to produce flowers, and then to reproduce,” Rogers explained.
ROOT ROT
But the Asian blight is not be the only disease that threatens the viability of the modern American chestnut. The second is a soil-borne pathogen called root rot.
“The root rot disease only lives in the very southern part of the range, basically from Virginia south and at lower elevations … [it] doesn’t like the cold. In fact, when you look at classical maps of the American chestnut, it shows the range stopping about here, where the mountains end. But really we have pretty good evidence now that it actually extended pretty much all the way down to the Florida line. And what we think happened was this root rot disease, which came in in the early 1800’s, wiped [the chestnut] out at the low elevations,” he continued.
HURRICANE CREEK
The Hurricane Creek restoration project involves breeding the American chestnut with its foreign counterpart, the Chinese chestnut, in order to cultivate a hybrid of the two species that retains the desired physical characteristics of the native American tree while adding the natural blight-resistance of its Asian counterpart.
Rogers said TACF is operating hundreds of orchards nationwide, and roughly 15-20 in Georgia. Rogers said that as the Georgia chapter president, he realized that the Hurricane Creek property, which is managed by UNG’s College of Science and Math, would be a great fit for the restoration effort.
“Since I got involved in this 8 or 10 years ago, I said ‘You know what? Why isn’t UNG doing any of this work? We’re right in the middle of it. The state champion tree is right here in Lumpkin County. There’s a lot of national forest in Lumpkin County. This is a place where it should be happening,’ Rogers recalled.
Fadroski agreed that the timing was perfect to make use of the UNG property, which was sitting idle at the time. In order to make the necessary space for the orchard, however, a small planted pine forest had to be clearcut first so that ample sunlight could flood in.
“It was a planted pine forest that was never attended to,” Fadroski explained. “We’ve had this land for awhile, but prior to us being here the trees were never cared for and they grew too close together. And it was actually dangerous to have students out here, because if you get any sort of wind the tops would start breaking. And we had an invasive beetle in the trees … But this place here is open, so you’re able to do the orchard, and of course [there is] the potential to expand,” she said.
“It’s a big program. It takes a lot of planning, and testing and screening. This orchard will probably eventually have 300 trees or so, depending on how things go,” Rogers added.
Rogers admitted that nationwide, the hybrid approach has not quite yielded the results that researchers had initially hoped.
“It’s not a failure. The trees we have right now that came out of that hybridization program do have some pretty good blight resistance, [just] not as much as we were hoping for. The original intention was the [sixth generation] would have been the endpoint,” Rogers said.
FUTURE OPTIONS
Another, more high-tech option for solving the American chestnut crisis involves using cutting-edge genetic insertion technology currently under development at New York State University.
“There’s a gene in a Native American wheat plant, and they can insert this one little gene into an American chestnut, and it works. It doesn’t do anything with the root rot, but we think that problem is going to be manageable,” Rogers said.
While Rogers believe this process holds great potential for the future, federal deregulation is required before the technology can be implemented. He added that there are currently no transgenic materials being handled at the Hurricane Creek site.
“The federal government tightly controls that material. So today, we are able to experiment with that, but it’s in a very tightly-controlled situation. Every [participating] orchard has to … make sure there’s zero chance that any of that transgenic material will escape into the environment,” Rogers indicated.
Rogers said that he expects federal approval for the transgenic chestnut tree in a matter of weeks, which has the potential to radically transform TACF’s efforts going forward.
“The [chestnuts] that live here are going to probably be … good root rot resistant trees … [If] we pollinate them with this transgenic pollen, the offspring of those trees should be blight and root rot resistant,” Rogers said.
Rogers did add that UNG would have to weigh in on that plan, even after the federal green light is received.
“We have to be cognizant of the fact that there’s a controversial aspect of it,” he said. “There are communities that are totally opposed to GMO, without really understanding the science behind it. I like to tell people, ‘Look, humans have been genetically modifying organisms, plants and animals, for 10,000 to 30,000 years. We’re just using a different technology that’s more powerful and a little faster, that’s letting us do things that maybe we couldn’t do in the past, but really it’s no different, I think, than what humans have been doing to living organisms since the beginning of human society,” Rogers added.
VOLUNTEERS WANTED
Rogers described Hurricane Creek as a “gigantic science project” that requires a lot of motivated people to collect material, manage the orchard, and monitor results. He appealed to the community for help with the project going forward.
“I would say probably 75 percent of the human effort in this is volunteers who are not professional scientists. I’m not a professional scientist; I’m a volunteer. We do have professional scientists that are involved and are steering the research effort, but a huge amount of this is people who just think this is a cool thing and say ‘Yeah, I want to get involved.’ We would love to have people. We need people to get involved, join the organization, and come help us. And help us get the word out, too,” Rogers concluded.
To learn more about the work of The American Chestnut Foundation, or to donate time or resources to their efforts, visit www.acf.org.