Jim Cortese, TIPCO in Knoxville Tennessee, a long time valued Mauget distributor shared a family photo of a visit to the famous giant sequoia tree (Circa 1923), “The Wawona Tree.” that stood in Mariposa Grove, Yosemite National Park.
Pictured are his Grandmother, Beulah Slagle, sitting on hood of car with sister Nellie next to her on left, their mother, Jim’s great grandmother and Jim’s Granny Kincaid, is lady in the white hat.
The famous “Wawona Tree”, stood in Mariposa Grove, Yosemite National Park, California. and was cut in 1881 as a tourist attraction.
It was the second standing sequoia to be tunneled (the first, a dead tree, still stands in the Tuolumne Grove in Yosemite). The “Wawona Tree” stood for 88 summers before it fell during the severe winter of 1968-69. Factors leading to its failure include heavy snow, wet soil, and, of course, the weakening effect of the tunnel. When it fell, the Wawona Tree was approximately 2,100 years old, 234 feet high (71.3 meters), and 26 feet in diameter at the base (7.9 meters). The famous tunnel was 7 feet wide, 9 feet high and 26 feet long at the base (2.1 meters by 2.7 meters by 7.9 meters).
Thank you Jim for sharing this wonderful memory with us all..
Public spaces, squares, and parks in New York City are administered by the city’s Department of Parks & Recreation (NYC Parks).
In recent years, the agency has been responsible for creating new programs to help children, youth and adults be aware of the importance of caring for their urban landscape.
One of these programs is a TreesCount! which in 2015 gathered 2,300 volunteers to learn about the trees in their environment, what state they are in, what care they need, what their measurements are, and how they benefit the surrounding community, etc.
For months, they walked the streets of the five boroughs together with a group of monitors who previously trained them to recognize what trees they were studying and their characteristics.
Now the information gathered on these walks, which gave rise to an urban forest registry, is available on the New York City Tree Map. With it, you can view statistics on each of the 685,781 registered trees, a calendar of activities related to tree care, the total number of species and find out which is the most common tree in your neighborhood.
In terms of data for each tree, no detail was left out, since each one was assigned a unique ID number, as well a color indicating its species. In addition, it has its exact location accompanied by its corresponding image in Google Street View, the possibility of reporting any possible issues that may arise and a summary of the ecological benefits for each tree translated into an economic value.
This means that when choosing a tree on the map you can see the amount of rainwater it retains each year (expressed in gallons) and the money each individual specimen saves each year. The amount of electricity conserved is also estimated, calculated in kilowatts per hour (kWh), as well as the reduction of air pollution.
All these are formulated according to figures from U.S. Forest Service that estimate the total ecological benefits a tree gives in dollars. In the case of the tree in the image below, this one has a benefit for its population that amounts to slightly more than $500 USD each year.
If you want to check the map out for yourself click here.
Celebrating Deep Freeze, Insect Experts See a Chance to Kill Off Invasive Species
The extreme cold has the potential to beat back some of the invasive insects threatening treasured local tree and plant species. “You do think, ‘Oh great, maybe some of those nasty insects are going to get zapped today,’ ” said Mark Fisher, director of conservatories and horticultural programs at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. “It’s Mother Nature’s way of dealing with this issue.” The insects, whether introduced pests like the hemlock woolly adelgid or native ones like the southern pine beetle, have weakened forests from Cape May, N.J., to Litchfield County in Connecticut. They are uncannily adept at surviving the winter, but most have a breaking point. And this week, that point was nigh.
“The lethal temperature for the woolly adelgid is minus 4 or 5 degrees Fahrenheit,” said Richard S. Cowles, a scientist with the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, a state research center. “I was cheering a couple of days ago because most of the adelgids will be dying from the temperatures we saw.”
Dr. Cowles, an entomologist, admitted to rejoicing that temperatures for the early morning hours of Saturday had ranged from 3 degrees to minus 9 in the state. Then came another deep freeze on Tuesday. “At that temperature, ice crystals start forming in the woolly adelgid’s body, and it kills them,” he said. But entomologists cautioned that once an invasive species has arrived, it is almost always a matter of managing the population, not eradicating it. Some will inevitably survive. Dr. Cowles said that the adelgid population could still rebound within two years.
An aphid-like insect, introduced to the United States in the 1950s from Japan, the woolly adelgid has killed hundreds of thousands of Eastern hemlocks in Connecticut alone since arriving there in the 1980s. The pest, about the size of a period, can pierce the base of needles and suck out the tree’s nutritional supply. The adult can survive the winter on a branch. Chris Roddick, an arborist at the garden. Nicole Bengiveno / The New York Times Extreme cold is a fortuitous management tool. But with a warming climate, it is one that scientists cannot count on. “The weather will give them a temporary setback, but as soon as the weather warms up, they will take off again,” said Jan Nyrop, a professor of entomology and senior associate dean of Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. In the Pinelands in southern New Jersey, state foresters have been battling the southern pine beetle. The beetle can tunnel through a tree’s bark, eating a layer of tissue that supplies the tree with critical nutrients. Until recently, the beetles, which are native to the southern United States, did not survive north of Delaware, because of the cold. But that has changed as winters have turned milder. The past century in New Jersey has seen a warming trend of 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit. More important than average temperatures in the beetles’ spread is the lack of periodic cold snaps in which the temperature plunges to minus 8 degrees.
The Pinelands have not experienced that kind of cold since 1996, and the first southern pine beetles were detected several years later. Whether the recent deep chill was enough to thwart their progress remains to be seen. The temperature for the past week in Chatsworth, N.J., in the heart of the Pinelands, reached a low of minus 7 on Saturday. Ron Corcory, the project coordinator for the southern pine beetle with the New Jersey State Forestry Services, said that “sustained, very cold” weather was a powerful weapon. “We’re certainly optimistic that this will have some impact, but we won’t know until the spring,” he said. “We’d want to see a lot of green tops of trees.” Emerald ash borers need even colder temperatures to succumb. The insects were first detected in 2002, after they arrived on wood pallets from China, and have since killed tens of millions of ash trees in more than 20 states. Studies suggest that temperatures must plummet to minus 30 degrees in order to achieve widespread mortality, and foresters and scientists in Minnesota and Illinois, where it was that cold this week, were hoping for a die-off. But in New York, scientists were setting their sights on other targets. Amy Berkov, an assistant professor of biology at City College of New York, said she was hoping for some downward pressure on ticks, some of which spread Lyme disease. She recalled a field trip during the unusually mild winter two years ago when one of her students came back bearing a tick. Dr. Berkov, who specializes in tropical ecology, said that she was warmed by this week’s cold. “Even though I work in the tropics, I like a seasonal climate,” she said. “I think it does tamp down some of these things that we’d rather not be seeing more of.”
(This combination of two file photos shows, top, the cracked and dry bed of the Almaden Reservoir in 2014, in San Jose and, below, the same reservoir full of water in 2016. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)
More than 40 percent of California has emerged from a punishing drought that covered the whole state a year ago, federal drought-watchers said Thursday, a stunning transformation caused by an unrelenting series of storms in the North that filled lakes, overflowed rivers and buried mountains in snow.
The weekly drought report by government and academic water experts showed 42 percent of the state free from drought. This time last year, 97 percent of the state was in drought.
Southern California, also receiving welcome rain from the storms, remains in drought but has experienced a dramatic reduction in the severity. Just 2 percent of the state, a swath between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, remains in the sharpest category of drought that includes drying wells, reservoirs and streams and widespread crop losses. Forty-three percent of the state was in that direst category this time a year ago.
California will remain in a drought emergency until Gov. Jerry Brown lifts or eases the declaration he issued in January 2014, while standing in a bare Sierra Nevada meadow that one of the state’s driest stretches on record had robbed of all snow.
State officials said this week that Brown will likely wait until the end of California’s winter snow and rain season to make a decision on revising the drought declaration.
More than 40 percent of California out of drought, officials say
For Northern California, at least, the onslaught of storms that brought the Sierras their heaviest snow in six years and forced voluntary evacuations of thousands of people as rivers surged will likely make it a much clearer call for the governor, water experts said.
“It’s hard to say we have a drought here right now,” said Jay Lund, director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California at Davis, an area near Sacramento that was awash after its heaviest rain in 20 years.
Lund spoke on his way back from taking students to see flood gates on the Sacramento River, opened by state officials Tuesday for the first time in 12 years to ease pressure on river banks and levees.
The opened gates were spilling a two-mile torrent of excess water into public lands in the Sacramento Valley, alongside the equally raging Sacramento, the state’s largest river.
The past week’s storms were enough to double the snowpack in parts of the Sierras, runoff from which provides Californians with much of their year-round water supply. Stations up and down the mountain chain were reporting twice the amount of normal rain and snow for this time of year.
The state’s reservoirs were brimming above average for the first time in six years.
“It’s been so wet in some places this winter we would do pretty well even if it tapered off right now,” said Daniel Swain, a fellow at the University of California at Los Angeles whose weather blog has been a closely watched chronicle of the state’s drought.
Water experts look at factors including soil moisture, stream levels and snow pack in determining drought, said Claudia Faunt, a San Diego-based hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
In a state as sprawling and varied as California, “where we are in a drought is complicated,” Faunt said.
In the towering forests of centuries-old Eastern Hemlocks, it’s easy to miss one of the tree’s nemeses. No larger than a speck of pepper, the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid spends its life on the underside of needles sucking sap, eventually killing the tree. This insect is one in an expanding army of insects draining the life out of forests from New England to the West Coast. Aided by global trade, a warming climate and drought-weakened trees, the invaders have become one of the greatest threats to biodiversity in the United States.
In towering forests of centuries-old eastern hemlocks, it’s easy to miss one of the tree’s nemeses. No larger than a speck of pepper, the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid spends its life on the underside of needles sucking sap, eventually killing the tree. This insect is one in an expanding army of insects draining the life out of forests from New England to the West Coast. Aided by global trade, a warming climate and drought-weakened trees, the invaders have become one of the greatest threats to biodiversity in the United States.
Bur Oak Blight A serious leaf blight disease on bur oak has been recognized in several Midwestern States since the 1990s with Iowa reporting its first occurrence of this disease 6 or 7 years ago. A common leafspot fungus, Tubakia dryina, was initially thought to be the cause of the blight on bur oak, but closer examination revealed a different story. Researchers in Iowa confirmed that this disease is caused by a new, and yet unnamed, species of Tubakia. The disease was named bur oak blight, or BOB for short. There are now five known species of Tubakia that can infect bur oak in Iowa, but only one species causes dramatic leaf symptoms and tree mortality characteristic of BOB.
Hosts and Distribution BOB occurs only on bur oaks. Severe symptoms of BOB have been observed only on Quercus macrocarpa var. oliviformis, a variety of bur oak that produces smaller acorns. BOB occurs primarily on naturally established trees, and especially on mature trees on upland sites that appear to be remnants of savannah forests. Bur oak growing in dense forests and on bottomland sites is less seriously affected. It is not clear if this new species of Tubakia is a recent arrival to this region or if a shift in climate (more early-season rain events) has made this disease more noticeable over the last two decades. To date, the BOB fungus is known to occur from northeastern Kansas and eastern Nebraska to central Minnesota and southwestern Wisconsin, and across most of Iowa. This disease is most severe in eastern Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota, which coincides closely with the distribution of Quercus macrocarpa var. oliviformis. A few affected trees have also been identified in Illinois and Missouri.
Symptoms Leaf symptoms typically first appear in late July or August. Infected leaves develop purple-brown lesions along the midvein and major lateral veins on the underside of leaves (figure 1). As the lesions increase in size, dark veins become noticeable on the upper leaf surface (figure 2). Large, wedge-shaped areas of chlorosis and necrosis develop on the leaf blade, and major leaf mortality may occur (figure 2). Individual lesions may coalesce and cause large areas of the leaf to die, giving it an overall wilted or scorched appearance (figure 3). The symptoms of wilting and leaf scorch resemble, and have been confused with, symptoms induced by oak wilt. During the summer, black fruiting structures of the fungus form along the dark leaf veins and produce rain-splashed spores. These fruiting bodies can be seen with the aid of a 10X magnifying lens (figure 4). Later in the season, black pustules (fruiting bodies of the fungus) develop on the petioles of infected leaves (figure 5), and mature spores are seen in these pustules the next spring.
A unique feature of BOB is that some of the killed leaves remain on the tree during the winter (healthy bur oak trees shed all of their leaves in the fall). Not all infected leaves, however, remain attached. Some leaves drop off during the growing season and some are blown off by winter winds (figure 6). If BOB-infected leaves drop or are blown off, their petioles typically remain attached to the tree. The disease can be confirmed by microscopic examination of the pustules that form on the petiole base. The disease tends to intensify from year to year in individual trees. If only a portion of the crown is affected, BOB symptoms usually start in the lower branches and progress up the tree. If a tree is seriously affected one year, it tends to be severely affected the next year. BOB appears to spread slowly, particularly from tree to tree. It remains a mystery why BOB does not spread more rapidly given the great abundance of spores that cause BOB and their spread by rain. Not all stands of bur oak are seriously affected by this disease. Even within a seriously affected stand, not all trees are equally susceptible. Some trees may be severely infected while adjacent trees appear healthy (figure 7). This is likely due to variation in the resistance of individual bur oak trees to this disease.
Management Over time, severely affected trees may die. Tree death is usually associated with severe blight over many years and damage caused by secondary invaders such as the two-lined chestnut borer and Armillaria root rot. Boosting tree vigor may prolong the life of affected trees and ward off invasion by secondary pests. Because the fungus overwinters on infected leaf petioles that remain on the tree, removing fallen leaves is not an effective management tool. In preliminary studies, injections with a triazole fungicide in late May or early June (prior to leaf symptoms) have reduced symptom development in the fall and the following year. With further study, fungicide treatments may have value in managing high-value landscape trees.
Mauget will host the TCIA , Certified Treecare Safety Professional (CTSP) program in their 20,000 square foot facilty in Arcadia California. The program begins April 4, 2017.
The Certified Treecare Safety Professional (CTSP) program allows one or more key employees at a given company to become certified tree care safety experts, thereby empowering and encouraging a culture of safety within that organization. The CTSP program helps you protect employees/coworkers; prevent accidents and save lives; plus lower costs, improve morale, and increase production. CTSP workshops are a requirement of the certification. As an added benefit, TCIA members receive reduced pricing.
An Early Fall thru Late Fall injection application of Mauget’s Mycoject Ultra will be in the tree the following Spring at the earliest stages disease development. Mauget’s Mycoject Ultra Antibiotic will be in the tree exactly when needed to suppress and fight against bacterial infections such as: Fire Blight, Ash Yellows, Bacterial Leaf Scorch, Phloem Necrosis, Lethal Yellows.Trees affected include Pear, Ash, Elm, Liquidamber (Sweet Gum), Oak, Palm, Oleander and Sycamore.
In severe cases of infections or very favorable weather conditions further into the growing season, an additional Mauget injection treatment may be helpful.
Spring is a time of year during which most tree care professionals are very busy. Early thru late Fall injections may be performed during a longer period of time (over several months in some cases) when applicators are usually not as busy.
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A unique feature of BOB is that some of the killed leaves remain on the tree during the winter (healthy bur oak trees shed all of their leaves in the fall). Not all infected leaves, however, remain attached. Some leaves drop off during the growing season and some are blown off by winter winds (figure 6). If BOB-infected leaves drop or are blown off, their petioles typically remain attached to the tree. The disease can be confirmed by microscopic examination of the pustules that form on the petiole base.
