 For a snowy day almost a year ago, so here we are, the conservation coordinator for the Nature Conservancy, which as you probably know is a national organization that does all kinds of good work here in Vermont, much good work including things like Park Hill and I don't know what all, lots. He shepherds conservation projects all the way through and he divides his time between land protection, stewardship and science. So he's very busy and I just asked him if he loved his job and he said, oh yeah. And I can only say who will eat. So please welcome. That's a good thing. Alright, so just to start, if I lower in volume someone just raise your hand and I'll make sure to speak up. So yeah, my name is Gus Goodwin, I work at the Nature Conservancy here in Montpelier and as Lawrence said, I get to do lots of different things but by far and away my favorite piece of my work is working with the American Elms. It's something I just, it's a wonderful program and when I first started I didn't really think too much about it. I mean, why wouldn't you want to bring back a species? It's an elm, it's beautiful, enough said but as I worked more and more on it and I learned some of the science and the rationale for why the Nature Conservancy is working on the elm, it became an even more compelling story and that's what my goal here today is to kind of show you the whole picture of why we're working on the elm and why we think it's so important and this is the story I knew when I started working with the Nature Conservancy. So this is a street scene from Michigan 1971 on the top, 1984 below and you can see just the really dramatic changes, the loss of all of those elms. The Dutch Elm disease arrived in the United States in about 1928 and it was on a shipment of wood bound for Ohio. It came from the Netherlands and it landed in New York and then when the disease kind of radiated out from there it's a fungal pathogen and it's spread by bark beetles which are both native and non-native so these beetles kind of carried this disease around and it spread across the country and it really got going in the 50s and 60s when a second strain of the disease emerged and it was really particularly deadly and by the late 80s more than 75% of the elms in the across the United States and North America had died and a similar story played out on our flood plains so this is a photo of the Red River up in Saskatchewan it's taken in 1997 and all of those trees are big healthy mature elms and this is one of the last places on the continent for Dutch Elm disease to arrive it's right at the northwestern edge of the range for American Elm the furthest away from that introduction point and one of the last places for the disease to arrive and while this doesn't look exactly like our flood plains would have before the arrival of Dutch Elm disease it's actually fairly similar we have a lot of evidence from botanical surveys, witness trees, journal articles that Elm was a really important place or really important tree in our flood plains and so something like this may have may have been a common sight on the Connecticut River and before really kind of getting going with the Elm story I also want to take this opportunity to tell you a little bit about the nature conservancy as Lawrence said we're a global organization we're one of the world's leaders in conservation we were founded in 1951 first in the state of New York we're now in all 50 states and 71 other countries we've protected 119 million acres of land that's 20 times the size of Vermont or one Texas we've done 5,000 miles of river protection marine sanctuaries and we have over a million people who are members and support our work and here in Vermont we've been here since 1961 I believe 1960 our first project was Molly Bogg in central Vermont it's now one of UVM's natural areas since then we've helped protect over 183,000 acres in Vermont and we do a whole bunch of different types of work we've bought land we help transfer land we've worked with the state and the feds and protected a lot of places that you've probably been to or heard of like Mount Mansfield Camel Sump Long Trail we've our work has helped to build those natural areas across the state and the map on the left shows where our work is touchdown and the map on the right shows the lands that we currently own and manage we have 56 natural areas totaling about just shy of 30,000 acres and they're all open to the public and they're wonderful places to visit our nearest one is Chickering Bogg in Calus has anybody been there yeah it's just it's beautiful it's one of my favorites and then we also have a bunch of land protected through conservation easements for an extra 30,000 acres that's that we're responsible for stewarding and while we're best known for our land protection work our work is actually very varied and I want to show you this slide because I think it totally captures the kind of ambition and scope of our mission so this is in the maidstone town of maidstone northeast kingdom we're looking across the Connecticut River over into New Hampshire and in the foreground is the davit tract which is part of our maidstone bends natural area we're assembling this area bit by bit piece by piece to try and create a really big block of high-quality floodplain on the Connecticut that's protected and you can see in the background there's a really nice piece of floodplain forest and in the foreground we've got a hayfield that we we lease out to a farmer you'll also see a really large riparian buffer that we planted to help stabilize the river banks filter runoff and jump start the establishment of future floodplain forests and there's the river itself the Connecticut River is a long-standing priority for the nature conservancy we actually have a special team devoted just to working on issues related to the Connecticut River and they do habitat assessments under they do science to help us understand critical river processes and they're actually even working with hydro dams to figure out how to release water from the dams in a way that mimics the natural flooding regime and then further off in the background you see Nash Stream State Forest it's about 40,000 acres that the T that TNC helped the state of New Hampshire and the federal government protect and then lastly the 10,000 acre vicky bundle preserve which the Nature Conservancy owns and manages as a wilderness area as a compliment to all of the active working forests that surround it and I think this really shows the breadth of our vision and you may wonder well where does the elm fit in you know that's such a huge landscape scale visit and what you know why devote all this effort to a single species and that's the question I want to answer for you guys so here is that same area in Maidstone under flood in 2011 so floodplains they're critical to our well-being they provide critical habitat and they help reduce the severity of floods on downstream towns and as destructive as this looks this is actually a really important ecosystem process it provides unique habitat it helps rebuild soil fertility and it helps the river kind of stay stable over time rather than fighting against its banks but for our flooding to be healthy our forests need to be healthy and that's where the elm starts to figure into the equation so our team led by Dr. Christian Marks did a huge comprehensive study of floodplain forests along the Connecticut tip to tail they looked at over a hundred sample sites they measured like 15,000 trees they described all the different types of floodplain forest on the length of the river and they identified the critical habitats that are remaining and then they also worked to quantify the relationship between vegetation and ecosystem processes so remember I said they were working with the hydro dams to figure out a natural flooding regime this team actually figured out how much flooding in days each different species needs to thrive so if you can say if we can release if we can get four days of flooding downstream that's going to really help elm or if we need to protect species X we know that we need to figure out how to create this many days of natural flooding so it's a really powerful data set but as far as the elm goes there's really two critical pieces of conclusions that came out of this work and the first is is that there's not enough high quality floodplain habitat left to meet our conservation goals so there's a shortage of habitat on the Connecticut River so we have to begin to think about restoration if we want to be building more habitat on the river and the second is that if we want to do restoration we have to figure out what to do about Dutch Elm disease and I should say if people have questions if I'm going too fast like please answer like raise your hand I'm happy to answer questions as we as we go through all this but if you want to wait till the end that works for me too so today elm is still widespread this is a graph that came out of that research I was just describing and there's kind of two important things that you should notice in this so along the bottom we have the different types of tree species you can find on the floodplain in Connecticut so we've got silver maple American elm red maple green ash boxel their sycamore and a handful of others and the important conclusion here is that elm is the second most abundant tree so you see the blue the blue line that's the number of trees so it's the second most abundant tree on all of our floodplains and the red bar shows us that it's the most widespread it occurs at over 90% of the sites along the Connecticut and it's actually the only tree species that we found that occurs in every single type of floodplain forest along the whole length of the rivers yeah they're not dead yeah exactly so this that's kind of like the big mystery right you know well we lost like look at our streets there's no more elms but then what the heck so that that's that's exactly what's going on there this is what's happening and that's kind of the question so why are there still all these elms around and is Dutch Elm disease affecting our floodplains if there's still so many elms yeah new ones no there's they're not resistant yet they so what happens is the elms they reproduce and then they die so the disease allows it doesn't kill the trees at a young age they're still able to reproduce so the elms are perpetuating on the landscape they're just not getting big and so that's what this graph shows I think very clearly so we have Elm in dark gray and silver maple in light gray and across the bottom we have the size of the tree trunk so you know a proxy for how big and old it is and then we have just the number of trees on the y-axis and you can see that in the small size classes Elm and silver maple are pretty evenly matched but you get to a certain point about two feet in diameter and the Elm just drops off so that's part of the story it's not getting big and if you go back and think about just the sheer number of trees I think that the shortfall between Elm and silver maple shown in blue is kind of explained by that big gap in size so the as I was saying the pathogen kills the tree at a certain time but it's not early enough to kill the tree before it reproduces so there's all these Elms out there they're still vulnerable to the disease but they're able to reproduce and set seed and kind of create new seedlings that are not either that resistant and that's a problem because Elm big Elms especially play a big role in our floodplains yeah they're just they're not reaching their full potential they're ecological maturity and that leaves an important like ecological niche or a seed at the table unfilled in our floodplains so there's this big hole that's missing that can only really be filled by large mature Elms and we know that Elms get big and we know that they get old at one point in time I think most of the big trees ever observed in New England were Elms the historic big trees this is the Sheffield Elm from in Massachusetts and it was so big that 500 people could sit in its shade during town meeting and when it died in the early 1920s they estimated that it would be about 400 years old so we know Elms get big we know they get old but they're just not because of the way the disease is killing the trees at about their middle age okay so why does that matter mature Elms occupy this unique ecological role and without that our floodplains are kind of there they have an empty seat and I want to show you a little bit about what that might look like and why this is important so thinking about a river system right so here's a generic stream cross section it's going like this and it's not hard to imagine that closest to the river at lowest elevations we get a lot of flooding and as you go uphill you get less flooding so there's this gradient of flood severity and the tree species each species has kind of a sweet spot where of it likes flooding or it tolerates flooding or it can't handle it at all so along that gradient of low flooding to high flooding you're going to find a special spot for each tree species and Elm for example is kind of about three-quarters of the way up way up top you'd find sugar maple and beach you know those are species that don't like to be flooded and then right down by the water you'd find silver maple and the other neat thing to consider is this concept of forest development so the river remember we saw this stream channel like this it doesn't actually stay put in time it moves back and forth as the river moves back and forth and this photo shows the movement of a river and this is again right that same natural area we keep looking at up on the Connecticut River so in this photo the river is actually moving from the right into the left and you can see it's cutting into that big stream bank that's actually a field we manage and the loss of soil there has been something like 60 feet a decade so the river is moving really fast in that area a decade yeah we had to go out and we have a riparian buffer section and we had to move the signs or like fish them out of the river you know we set them up and you know they're most of them are gone but the endpoint the kind of the one thing to think about is so as the river is moving across the slide we're actually gaining ground on this side so we've got this kind of nice sandy sandy substrate and some species like cottonwood and willow really thrive in this environment they can handle the direct sun the dry soils dry in the summer the flooding and this is they're kind of the first ones to arrive in this new environment and we call them pioneer species and as the river continues to move left the land on the right will continue to get a little higher and a little drier and the pioneer species will change the environment they'll change the soil chemistry the soil texture and all of these things kind of make it ready for the next cohort of species to come along on the Connecticut this is often silver maple so we have this kind of predictable change in species based on the age of the landform and another way to think about this is maybe if you've paddled the canoe down the river like imagine you're paddling down this river here you land your canoe you hop out you're on the hot sand and you walk and you walk slightly uphill and then eventually you kind of reach this like chest high thicket of shrubs and bushes and you punch through that and you walk back a little further and then there's kind of that big berm that you kind of have to crawl over before you end up in the dark forest and so that is another way to think about the gradient and that's a very predictable occurrence along the Connecticut River and that's that dark forest where Elm does well it's a species that's unique amongst all the floodplain species because it reproduces well under a shady canopy so those other species they need full sunlight to get started and Elm is the only species in that mix that does well under a shaded canopy so if you think about forests you know if there's a trajectory with the beginning and an end or a cycle that maybe restarts again the Elm is the tree that shows up right at the end it's the tree that's part of the most mature fully developed floodplain forest yes this is this the deposition of a point bar so the as the river is cutting into this area here it's depositing sands here and so this area is actually getting higher and drier and this is the area where the the forest is developing exactly yeah then we'll continue to develop and change all right so I think kind of the important piece we're getting at and we're gonna arrive at this this kind of diagram that made me really understand the importance of Elm so we have these two concepts we just talked about flood frequency and we also talked about forest age and so if you can kind of wrap your head around the fact that right by the river you're gonna have lots of flooding and younger forests or younger landforms like the age of the trees may be determined by who's cut them most recently but it's gonna be younger forest right by the river and further back you're gonna have less flooding and slightly older forest and if you were to measure the importance of the trees along that gradient this is what it would look like so this is kind of the we're gonna take some time and walk through this because I think this is really a nice depiction of why Elm is an important species so this is this came out of the research that I've been describing by Dr. Christian Marx and it shows two sites along the Connecticut River and on the bottom you can see there's an axis that says distance from beach so think about that also being forest age and amount of flooding so on the left side lots of flooding younger forests on the right side a little bit less flooding older forests and then the y-axis is the tree dominance which is a forester's measure of how important a tree is it takes into account the number of those trees where they're growing relative to the other trees and their size but it kind of it's a good bundle of index for how important a tree is and you can see that right by the water the shrubs so that's black willow and box elder are the most important then comes silver maple and then comes Elm and I think what I love about this is it shows that these species occupy these distinct spots on this graph and I think that we can think of our floodplains that way and you know these are distinct spots that each species occupies and losing a species not only just reduces the number of species that are available since not like if we lost Elm we just have two species the consequences that we lose a species that provides a really distinct role that other species can't provide yes with almost Americana right on top there yep great question and I mentioned earlier that we've been able to with through this research we could figure out exactly how much flooding they need Elm it requires four days four days of flooding yes over the course of the year they do and they also have bittersweet and all of those things alter forest floodplain and function but those are you know those are things you can you can manage or you can accept depending on the amount of resources you have but it and as far as it relates to forest development it it can limit which species can get established at a site we do manage on our on our lands when when we're able to yep but there are some sites where management is you have to explore different strategies and this is a this is a this is an invasive species management strategy right the Dutch Dutch Elm disease is an invasive species that's affecting the function of our floodplain forest so the work I'll describe next is one strategy for addressing that that's a great question okay oh I also just to piggyback off the concept of invasive species I want to say that green ash which is susceptible to the emerald ash borer which we've been hearing hearing a lot about is a tree species that on the southern stretch of the river is fairly similar to Elm and we're likely to see that one kind of wink out and succumb to emerald ash borer over time so I think to kind of put those concepts together you know it's we're really looking at a loss of diversity and function in our floodplains and that's something we should be alarmed about in any setting but I think that for floodplains it's particularly worrisome because we're down to at least in northern Vermont mostly silver maple so it's kind of like that street we were looking at in Michigan with one species lining both sides of the river and that's that's a very vulnerable spot to be in especially for an ecosystem that provides so much for our well-being like floodplains do I saw a hand yes yeah we have a real strong emphasis on the Connecticut River so that's why I keep defaulting to it but Elm would grow in floodplains on rivers big and small across the whole state yeah great question what are we losing yeah so floodplains well one they provide biodiversity so there's a lot of species that are kind of floodplain obligate it helps slow the flow of water so by allowing the water to hop up on its banks and kind of dissipate a lot of energy it makes flooding less destructive see it's got that we did it provides water quality benefits by allowing some additional filtration and ways for the settle so you know if you've got a lot of nutrients in the water having them to spend up onto a forest or field and deposit those nutrients is a really good fate for nutrients rather than having them get flushed downstream further yeah and of course the habitat and biodiversity benefits as well yep and I want to just talk a little bit about alms and wildlife because I think this is this is an important thing we overlook sometimes so a big yeah and that thing neat so that is one of about 200 species of moths and butterfly that are known to feed on the American Elm and what I love about this one is that it's actually it's co-evolved to have that stegosaurus shape that looks just like the margin of the leaf so it's kind of a great defense mechanism that's yeah right there it's a great nesting site for a lot of songbirds including the Baltimore Oriole and we know that vase shape it's actually a super canopy tree so it sticks its branches way up above all the other trees which makes it really good habitat for bald eagles which like to nest in kind of the highest thing around they get a good vantage point and then on top of that anytime you can get big old shaggy trees it's just great for wildlife mammals birds insects the whole package one of our scientists describe big Elm is kind of like an apartment complex for wildlife so all right um so to kind of just recap we've Elm is really important for our flood plain forests particularly our northern ones Elm is present but it's not surviving to reach ecological maturity and that makes our flood plains vulnerable because they're missing some sort of critical component that would define their structure and function and so I guess the next question is like what does it take to bring back a species how can we undo this and you know what is what are we doing about it and that's kind of the exciting part of this presentation you know the short answer for American Elm is that it takes survivors they say about one in every 10,000 Elms has some degree of tolerance to Dutch Elm disease and over the years we've worked with landowners and you know our partners and just kind of always kept an eye out the window whenever we're on road trips and we've identified maybe 150 trees that we believe have potential to be survivors and tolerate that exposure to Dutch Elm disease and over the years some of these have been identified and propagated by the nursery trade so you can actually buy something like a Princeton Elm or maybe you've heard of like Valley Forge or Delaware there's a handful of different Elm varieties that you can purchase that have been propagated by the nursery trade because they're tolerant of exposure to Dutch Elm disease which is wonderful the trouble is is that there's not enough genetic diversity in those selections for us to go out and start restoring our flood plants because we'd be essentially planting clones genetically similar or identical individuals across all of our restoration projects and if the disease evolved even the slightest amount all of those trees could be susceptible to disease and we'd be right back where we started so it's really critical for our work if we want to think about restoring flood plains with Elm to have a lot of genetic diversity so we're working with the Forest Service to kind of cultivate this genetic diversity and I want to draw the distinction between escapers and survivors so it's remember the disease it's a fungal pathogen that's spread by bark beetles so the beetles need to fly from tree to tree to expose the tree to the disease and the beetles have a flight range of about 300 feet so it's really pretty possible for an Elm to grow up without ever having been exposed to the disease and maybe you've seen you've drive through a like a farm field around here is a really good place to see one there's one huge Elm in the middle of the field and that tree may have reached that big size just simply because it was never exposed to the disease what we look for our trees like the one on the right which is hard to make out in this photo this is also incidentally from our Maidstone Bend's natural area but that's a big Elm and all the little trees right next to it it's a hedgerow of dead young Elms and so we know that those trees are dying from Dutch Elm disease their branches go up and they intermingle with the crown of that tree so it's surely being the big tree has surely been exposed to Dutch Elm disease so we know that it's warding off at least this current round of the disease and on a related note we tend to look for trees that are bigger under the assumption that they've survived maybe a couple exposures to the disease and that they're also older but we know that size doesn't always correlate with age and also oh go ahead yeah but when you find the ones nearby Elms nearby aren't those offspring of the other tree which shows it's there's still a susceptibility to right so the disease tolerance is kind of a spectrum it's not like a yes or no type thing so the parents will vary in their ability to tolerate the disease and the other thing is that Elms are wind pollinated so there's a lot of pollen falling flying around and so the mature Elm let's say this individual is disease tolerant it's breeding with individuals that are not disease tolerant so that that is getting a lost which is actually exactly why we do what I'm about to explain in the next couple slides I promise I'll explain it now I'm remembering we have something else to look at first but that's a great question and that's exactly what's happening in our floodplains and why why we need to help because without it even the survivors are still going to have the genes diminished by the the susceptible trees so we need an intervention which would be a great thing to talk about now but instead I was just going to tell you how much I love trying to figure out which trees are survivors and which ones are escapers it's just a great game I get to play in the field this is one of one of my contributions and this tree here is in front of a beautiful farm in Colbrook New Hampshire it's a bicentennial farm it's been in the same family since like 1790 or 80 something it's really it's it's cool it's a cool place to be it's a beautiful tree but at first glance based on everything we've just talked about it looks like it's likely an escaper right it's a big tree in the middle of a farm field nothing else around it but I spent a lot of time talking with the landowners and we looked at some old records they had at the house including I don't know if this has the feel of a Harmark Hallmark calendar or placemat to you but that's exactly what it is the farm's been photographed for these various promotional materials on several occasions and so we're able to look back and see oh there's there's actually a couple elms there we looked at an etching done by a family member of the farm and you can see there's a couple trees there and then we had some old photos of the farm itself you know from showing a the tree in the back is an elm so we had a couple different lines of converging evidence that say yeah this tree probably did survive and its neighbors didn't so it's likely to be a good candidate and this is a tree we have enrolled in our breeding program we found about 80 trees so far that we think have a pretty high likelihood of being survivors so to answer your question more directly about you know what do we do how do we ensure that these trees mate with the best possible mates to ensure that the genes are kind of passed down to their offspring so in the spring we send an arborist up into the tree I don't know if you can make them out there way at the end there there's kind of heart stopping to watch these guys in the tree he's tied in but no yeah that's it so they go up and they cut down a couple little twigs for us from each tree that we've identified and an elm tree has two types of buds on the twig so these big plump ones are the flower buds and then the one at the ends are the leaf buds I think they're kind of like hitchhiker's thumbs right at the end there and what we do is we we cut them we put them in a big cardboard box and we ship them overnight to our partners at the Forest Service in Ohio so that's how we kind of we isolate the genetic material and we send it off there the Forest Service has big plantations of trees that have proven to be tolerant of the disease so they have you know they have like tons of Princeton Elms and then Valley Forge Elms and so they have all these trees in a big orchard a big elm orchard and we kind of joke that this is like the dating service so we're you know making sure that these trees from New England in the Midwest have a chance to get together and it's it's fascinating the Forest Service is just they're an outstanding partner and they have such an incredible amount of expertise on this I had the great fun of sitting we did a tree exchange in western New York this spring I drove out and we like picked up the trees from them and we drove it the rest of the way and they were describing this process and it's just it's fascinating so each tree that we send from Vermont they get all these branches they're in this lab in Ohio and each tree has its own room they stick the you know they're all these twigs are in a vase and they're each in their own room so that there's no pollen contamination and then they wait for the pollen to fall out of the flower buds on wax paper and then they collect it and then they very carefully go out into their elm orchard where they've identified parent trees and they've actually bagged the flowers so that they can't be pollinated by any other elms and then they like snake a little tube in that's got compressed air and then they fill the bag with pollen it's just it's just genius it's so cool not every blossom but enough of them and then the other crazy part is then they have to know which ones they did and they wait for the seeds to develop so that's that's really neat that's how they do that yeah that's um and actually elm is it's wind pollinated so the pollinators don't have a real direct roll um but by isolating them with those bags we can really ensure that we know that parent a is mating with parent b and that's what we want yeah and then they keep tracking them yeah yeah um and i should say that they actually do two things so they do that process i just described and then the other thing they do is they take the leaf bud and they cut it off and then they graft it onto a little baby seedling and they grow it from there so that's how they clone the trees so we have two pathways going we have the experimental elm dating service and then we have the cloning process and the cloning is really important um because there's no test for genetic or no test for tolerance of dutch elm disease you just you have to expose the tree to the disease and see if it makes it and because the disease and the tolerance the tolerance to the disease is kind of a spectrum and it's a little bit of a mixed bag we need a lot of different trees even if they're all genetically similar and to then expose them all and kind of collect the average uh tolerance for all these trees uh yeah you can buy from the nursery are those the ones that the forest service has shipped out to nurseries yes and many of them are actually being propagated by nurseries themselves so there's a lot of different brand names there's um and those are all the thing to look for is whether or not they've been tested by the forest service and unfortunately one of the really common ones the liberty elm has never been tested by the forest service and hasn't held up well to the field trial so it's not one we can recommend although they have a great name they really like it okay so now we've got we've got those seeds and then what happens next is they send the seeds back to vermont um and we grow them into seedlings at our polteney nursery um and we have a couple other partners in this but the the polteney nursery is kind of the epicenter for this work and they grow into little seedlings they get about this tall and you know a little bit bigger around than a number two pencil um and then they're prepped for planting each seedling gets a number so we can go back through the genetic records and figure out who the parents were or if it's a clone um and they they get all this protective material and then we go out and plant them and the planting is just it's the highlight of the year it's so much fun and we have wonderful partners with fish and wildlife um and other state agencies some of our elms are planted on state land um so we had at one site we had to like take them across the river on a little boat ride so it just kind of felt very mythical and important um we work with professional tree planters I mean we're planting 2 000 trees at a time so we we have to have a lot of help we have just outstanding volunteers um and a handful of really excited landowners I don't know if you recognize this tree but it's the one um right in front of that Wallace farm that I was showing you and that's Mr. Wallace with his tree in the back drop he's thrilled that we're as psyched about his tree as he is and um in the foreground you can't really make it out but we planted a a baby Princeton elm there to try and replace some of the ones he lost and they're very generous and let us sample from their tree a couple times and we're about three quarters of the way through this effort so far we have 7 000 experimental elms in the ground most of them are planted up in the northeast kingdom we have a couple of sites where we've done really dense plantings and you can see these maps each black dot is an elm so there's a couple thousand at each of these sites and the other thing I should mention is that we're not planting just elms we alternate as we go down a row we alternate with um other trees we call them spacer trees to space out the grid and those trees are silver maple um balsam poplar other native tree species so what we're accomplishing here is one we're doing this huge experiment to try and propagate elms but we're also doing active floodplain restoration so even if the elms fail we have some advanced regeneration there that can start to restore these floodplains and there's also the benefit of having those spacer trees keeping the elms from root grafting uh which minimizes the chance that they would spread disease through that pathway um and we also have something like 25 other sites across Vermont that we've planted with smaller numbers of trees and we think of those as um we call them sentinel sites so this is like at one of our natural areas we'll plant 30 elms of a mixture of different genetic types so that you know we've got these little beach heads for genetic diversity where we can start to radiate the tree outwards and yeah yeah yeah yeah we'll let them take it from there um but yeah we plant them right in the grid together so that they can you know intermingle and we just hope that you know we'll be able to kind of accelerate this process and I was going to mention it later but now seems like a good time but one of the advantages of doing this kind of huge living experiment um is that hopefully it allows the trees to co-evolve with the disease so one of the risks of like a if we were to only be thinking about doing this in our urban forests like just planting on street trees um they don't have enough like intermingling um so that if the disease were to evolve let's say the disease evolves in all of our princeton's um now are vulnerable it wipes through all the different elms but there's not any genetic diversity in the understory you know it's it's just not a lot of insurance um so we're hoping that by having this kind of more wild setting that the elms can kind of co-evolve with the disease um and so some of our initial plantings are doing pretty well um not all of them are we have about 75 percent mortality but that's you know for a a big tree planting that's not really that bad i mean we it's not like we can be out there and care for them every day um and these ones are about eight years old and they're they're thriving um we have trouble with deer they like to for whatever reason they seem to prefer the elm over anything else we plant but we spray them with oh go ahead yeah oh well we should come up and plant hostas um we do uh we spray them with deer repellent and we try and keep the competition down and we we mull around them so we're trying to ensure these trees have the best shot um yeah so yeah this year we planted 2000 plus elms next spring we're going to do 2000 more and then the year after that we're hopefully going to do about 2000 more and that should bring us to about 11 000 elms total um what do you wrap them with at the bottom when you're shipping them um these ones are in little square pots um and then the white thing is it's just called tree ramp and what that does is it helps keep the uh voles and mice from eating the trees um we actually so this photo shows a different strategy we used to use um these bigger blue tubes um and what would happen is that the moles and moles it mice and voles there's a spoonerism there I couldn't get over um the little rodents they would get in there and then either they were hungry or they just got bored while they were waiting out the winter in their nice little like rodent condo and they would just they would eat the base of the tree and and girdle them um and then the crazy thing to wrap our heads around after all this work I just described is we're going to go out and we're going to expose every single tree to dutch elm disease and we'll see which ones make it and which ones don't and uh yeah so that kind of brings up a question that I'm sitting here thinking all of what you're doing here is to create disease resistant trees but is there another angle and I want to use the word vaccination because that's what it would be if it weren't humans or males to like um to protect the trees from the disease something along the lines of the yeah no that's an excellent question you can it's not a vaccination but it essentially it's an injection you give your tree um and it that will ward off the dutch elm disease it's a fungicide but it costs like 200 dollars per tree and you have to do it every three years I'm not sure you have to you kind of fumigate the soil and you inject the tree and um it does it work it does it works great and that's why if you go to Dartmouth college they still have these huge street elms and um yep and manitoba I think is like elm capital of the world and they've just decided they're gonna spend a lot of money to keep their elms how long because I used I lived on that street maybe not that street but the world you know the one and yeah the cathedral we call them cathedrals yeah right they're gone so how long has that been available that ability to I don't know if it's the right word but yeah you know I don't know when it became available but it's one of those things it's just it's too too expensive to be feasible in the long run because I've thought about that because that's nice little elms where do you where do you find somebody to do that a tree service will do it yep you were doing it in the 70s in Connecticut at Hodgkin's prep school oh yeah is it copper sulfate yeah I'm not sure what it is I think that's what they were using interesting yeah there've been a lot of different strategies um including I was reading his uh portions of Silent Spring that Rachel Carson book the Silent Spring it kind of it's about um they used to spray down the elms with this fungicide um to really and insecticide to try and kill the bark beals protect them and that was kind of the the cascade that led to the Silent Spring in the book yeah New York I think in their late 20s 20s yep okay yep and we know how it arrived by ship it did yep it was uh like a a load of veneer elm veneer bound for Ohio so I think it was probably even I think it was like burl veneers or something but yeah to go back to Holland what happens to the fungus there and the trees uh that's a really good question and I was gonna try and pounce on that following your question um but because it's very closely related um I believe where the pathogen is native the trees have evolved some sort of resistance to it so that they have a they're co-evolved where neither one really wipes out the other any of that seed stock well so that's what's really interesting about American elm so in chestnut they do that they've said oh we can and that's an invasive species in general that's a strategy you can use you can say okay like we've got you know this tree in North America is being killed by a virus from Europe let's go to Europe and we'll see if there's anything in the same same genus really closely related that tolerates that virus and then we'll breed them together um and that's what they're doing with chestnut but with elm the American elm is interesting because it's what's called a tetra ploid which means that it has yeah it has two sets of chromosomes which means it can't mate with any of the other members of its genus so that's the only way we can do this is um is work through our survivors and propagate them but with other species exactly you would do that so that's what they're doing with chestnut um then with the with ash they're taking even a different method um so they're the the disease it's not a disease it's an insect pest so what they're going to do there is likely look for a bio control so they'll go back to the native range of that insect and they'll see what other insects eat that the emerald of ash borer beetle and then we can release that and we've actually we have done some of that along the Connecticut the Nature Conservancy has worked with other folks to do some releases and I don't know if we have any preliminary results yet but that's a excellent questions it can really backfire yeah but the process has gotten really very rigorous as a result of those early mistakes so I think that we can have more confidence it's definitely always scary but I think that the process has really evolved a lot this there's a consequence of some pretty bad mistakes yes this is sort of a different question but I grew up on one of those farms that had a huge elf right in the front yeah and all the elves I ever saw had a huge thing coming out with a kind of an arm and and I don't see that on many of these elk trees they all the elves around here had this kind of a one wing that went out like this and all the more orials were always in the top and it was like you know it was all stood there by itself all alone in our front yard yeah until about 1960 when it got the disease and I I just surprised that these elves were so very different from the elves I remember in this area particularly that had this huge overhand you know and they were much they didn't have any leaves on the top it was all up on the top it doesn't you know these mature elves that I remember in this particular area I grew up in wadesfield mm-hmm yeah I don't really know how to speak to that it trees have such a variable form depending on the like minute characters of the environment they grow in and the elm does have a fairly distinctive shape and that those traits in the nursery trade the the people who are working to identify tolerant trees in that trade are taking things like that really seriously because that's an important characteristic for a street tree it's not something we consider as much in our work the things that we're looking for our disease tolerance and then site tolerance because we want trees that are adapted to our cold winters and our you know and working with the other tree species in our ecosystem most of the cultivars that have been identified are from the mid-atlantic or the midwest and they just they don't have what it takes to thrive in colbrook new hampshire so that's one of the the main goals of our program but other people are tracking those growth forms yeah that was given a question so there are other programs and other areas yes yeah I don't know the exact similarities there's lots of people working on elm it's I mean people have been working on it since Dutch elm disease arrived we're certainly not the only ones doing it what I think we are bringing is kind of a site specific lens we're pairing restoration and this kind of genetic experiment we're using fairly rigorous metrics for what constitutes a survivor you know I think that other other efforts have not really looked at the escaper versus survivor thing is quite as seriously but yeah so I think what we're really bringing is kind of the site specific lens that it's paired with the watershed restoration goals and that we have these mixed plantings that should allow us to accomplish restoration too there's not a national elm conference where you all get together and compare notes there is I've never been um is it yeah there are tons of people working on it I'd love to go but um our christian marks who's our chief scientist on this project um has been there and that some of his work has been published in those proceedings yeah your experiments when you expose these trees to Dutch elm disease how long does it take before you know whether or not they're tolerant about two years really yeah it's pretty fast um when a tree is exposed to the disease it it dies quickly yeah the ones that survive they often do show some limb loss there's um you know but they're able to compartmentalize the disease a little bit um and then the rest of the tree can thrive and bounce back after that time period but most trees die within two years yep um not as much we have a few elms planted on properties that would drain to the Winooski but we haven't done anything on the river banks themselves there yet a lot of the floodplain that's left on that the preserved floodplain is too wet for elms it's kind of going to be perennially stuck in silver maple territory um and you know that's kind of the other lens for both floodplains and elms is that they are one of our most highly disturbed ecosystems because that's where the great soils are so a lot of them were cleared for agriculture and elm is kind of a you know you wouldn't a lot of agriculture does not persist in the real like really wet floodplain but that kind of borderline stuff is really the sweet spot for ag and that was also a good spot for elm yep how are we doing on time getting close getting close okay well we're almost done um and i just wanted to end with kind of a map of uh where elm grows and just kind of to put these conversations in context and i think your question about who else is working on this is a nice way to pivot into this you know we're certainly not the only ones working on it we're doing our best in our area to kind of help accelerate this to achieve our conservation goals um but we're really hoping that a lot of the lessons and the products that we develop from this work can be shared elsewhere and be you know either implemented or just adopted yeah exactly yep um and one of let's see so some of the specific goals that we've identified as we think of all the 80 trees we've sampled we expect at least 10 of those to be like high quality disease tolerant trees that can then be released to the nursery trade we're not there yet we haven't done the testing but we think that we'll be able to add 10 more genotypes to the to the mix and then just kind of that big vision of we're going to have a dense genetically diverse cluster of these disease tolerant elms at the headwaters of some of new england's biggest water bodies hopefully they can co-evolve with the disease and be kind of a an epicenter for elm diversity and that they can kind of naturally set seed and send that down water to start to begin to restore um some of the downstream flood planes and add diversity and restore some of those critical ecosystem functions we talked about so that's the big goal and i there's a lot of questions i'm happy to stick around and answer as many as people have um and i want to say thank you all for being such an engaged and wonderful audience any other questions you know the novel called the overstory by richard powers it opens with a marvelous dramatic description of the invasion of the elm problem and as you read that book you will start to think like you already have that these trees are almost like people and they have children yeah and they have and it will turn your brain around about tree so it's the overstory it's fiction by bling and writer i wanted to ask another related question is there any other group i know you're not working on it but is there a group trying to get it from the elm trees planted on the elm streets uh we like to think let's see who's i think well so it's easy to find it's getting easier to find some of those cultivars um so if you wanted to plant them yourselves you can do that um and then i know that some urban foresters are considering planting these elms i know burlington has a couple um along the uvm campus especially they've planted some i know the elm trees but you're so beautiful yeah yeah thanks thanks very much thanks you're so welcome work is wonderful i've done oh i know it's definitely the best we're so lucky