A screenshot of the city of Syracuse’s emerald ash borer response plan.
To protect ash trees against a small bug, local government is going on the offensive, hoping that it won’t soon be on the defensive.
The bug is the emerald ash borer. It is capable of major damage to the local environment. “They spread somewhere between 100 yards and a half a mile a year,” said Stephen Harris, the Syracuse city arborist. “They infest until the population explodes and then they spread more rapidly.”
The bug bores into a tree, feeding on its inner bark so that water and nutrients cannot flow from the roots to the top. Infestations are hard to detect because the effects may not be visible for two or three years.
“A tree starts to show suckers and sprouts under the base and then your start to see dieback at the top of a canopy, so you’ll see branches with dead at the tips, and then you’ll see woodpecker activity,” Harris said. “When you start to see woodpecker activity, that’s a good telltale sign.”
To fight the little bug, the city plans a two-pronged attack: removing damaged trees and injecting some healthy trees with a pesticide.
The small, green, metallic beetle is believed to have first made its way to the United States on wood pallets used to deliver auto parts from China to the U.S., said Harris. In 2002, the invasive exotic pest was discovered near Detroit and, from there, spread in all directions, said Harris.
Now the bug is as close to Syracuse as Rochester, where it had infested 17 ash trees by June 2011 and killed one. To limit the bug’s spread, the state had imposed a quarantine to stop intrastate movement of ash wood products and other items determined by officials to present a risk in 16 counties in western New York and an area in eastern New York that included the counties of Greene and Ulster in 2010. Albany County and Orange County were later added.
As of May 1, Onondaga County will join much of the rest of New York State south of the New York State Thruway in the quarantine. This means that wood products, such as firewood, can be shipped more freely between regions within the quarantine. And that will increase the chances that the ash borer will make its way to Syracuse.
So far, the bug has not been spotted in Onondaga County. As one of its protective measures, the city plans to remove some ash trees located on city property or along city streets. It’s not clear how many trees will be removed. And at this point, there is no government help for private property owners looking to treat ash trees located on their property.
Injecting pesticide into selected ash trees is the other protective measure. About 700 trees deemed healthy enough will be given a pesticide developed to kill the insects once they bore into the tree and try to eat the inner bark, according to the Department of Parks, Recreation and Youth Programs’ plan.
“There’s not one management solution,” said Jessi Lyons of the Cornell University Cooperative Extension of Onondaga County, which has worked with the county to help form a plan to minimize the damage to the area. The goal, she said, is slowing down the spread of the insect and the potential damage to the ash tree population.
“We’re managing our trees in advance,” said Lyons, “so that we don’t have this huge decline in trees all at one time.”
(Heather Norris is a graduate student in magazine, newspaper and online journalism.)
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