PA Environment Digest

The PA Chapter of The American Chestnut Foundation held its fall meeting at the Mercer County Cooperative Extension building and Shaun Busler of Stream Restoration, Inc. and the Slippery Rock Watershed Coalition were excited to attend!

The meeting began with opening remarks from Alex Day, retired manager of Penn Nursery and continued with an interesting talk by Dr Lynn K. Rieske-Kinney, Professor of Forest Entomology at the University of Kentucky.

Lynn's presentation, "Chestnuts and the Gall Wasp," went over information regarding another new threat to the American Chestnut by an exotic species. The Asian or Oriental gall wasp first was observed infecting Chinese Chestnut trees in Georgia in 1974 and has spread to Pennsylvania.

The gall wasp has been in Mercer and Erie counties for more than 3 years, with significant numbers of galls appearing on many American Chestnuts in Mercer County in the spring of 2009.

The effect of the galls was a severe decline in tree vigor and decreased production of chestnuts. It is hoped that "Citizen Science," a volunteer observation and reporting organization, will aid in monitoring and overcoming this new threat.

Two additional speakers led talks before the lunch break of the meeting. Dr. Uma Ramakrishnan, Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Studies at Juniata College, spoke on the topic, "The American Chestnut as a Service Learning Project."

It is great to see the college contribute to the Foundation and to provide hands-on learning opportunities for the students.

After lunch was a presentation by Dr. Brian McCarthy called, "Chestnuts and Strip Mine Reclamation." This presentation provided a lot of great information on establishing hardwoods, particularly the American Chestnut, on strip mines. American Chesnnuts are well-suited to rocky, well-drained, acidic strip mine soils, which are abundant in the Slippery Rock Creek Watershed.

The last event of the meeting was a tour of the Haun Orchard, one of more than 150 chestnut research and demonstration orchards maintained by PA-TACF volunteers and citizen scientists to help support the regional tree breeding program. At the orchard, attendees were shown how the blight has affected the trees and the resulting sucker growth that still produces nuts every year.
Shaun was quite interested to learn more about the new and exciting things going on through TACF, including information on the layout of a chestnut demonstration orchard and the role chestnuts can play on AMD remediation sites. Hopefully, someday, the Slippery Rock Watershed Coalition can partner with the Foundation to bring back American Chestnuts to the watershed.

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