 Good afternoon, thank you for joining us. This is the Vermont Department of Libraries Tuesday Talk series. My name is Vincent LaVodie. I am a statewide consultant for special populations. I'm also director of the Abel Library of Vermont, which is a topic for another day. Today we are here to talk about the Emerald Ash War. I am very happy to announce our partnership with this department. The Department of Libraries, and many of you may know, I'm sure are already having your own events and awareness campaigns. This is Emerald Ash War week. We are in the midst of it right now. The Vermont Department of Libraries sent out posters and joining factual information to our network of libraries. We have been disseminating them. So you can please look for your community libraries for more information, and please contact the very nice folks here at the Vermont Urban and Community Forestry Program. It is my pleasure, oh, something to remind you all, there are some books and materials up at the back. Please feel free to take them. They are yours to take. They are free. These were donations to the Vermont Department of Libraries, and we are happy to pass them on to you. And I think you also put some things up there too. So those are for you to take, take and share. I don't know, gifts, various things. So it is my pleasure to introduce Elise Shabler. Shabler, right? Perfect. Yes. It's the Vermont Urban and Community Forestry Program's Technical Assistance Court. She is sort of on the front lines of helping towns prepare for and respond to the invasive Emerald Ash borer. She first moved to Vermont to pursue her master of science from the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources here at UM. She's also ISA certified partners and a Burlington master naturalist. Elise enjoys spending quality time with her family and the good people that fill her life, which we hope now includes the department. So as I mentioned before, May 18th to May 24th is Emerald Ash Borer Awareness Week, and we are a proud partner in promoting awareness and really helping to preserve our state's unparalleled natural resources. Welcome Elise. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, thanks so much. Can I just quickly get a lay of the land of who's, since we are such a small group. Maybe where you're from, if you work for the state or if you're just here. I live in my village. I have ashtrays on around my house. Okay. Some of which will probably fall. Okay, great. I live in East Montpelier and in B2M ashtrays around. Great. I live in Montpelier and I'm just interested in the subject. Great. I'm from Plainfield and I'm a member of the former of Emerald Ash Borer Task Force in town. Fantastic. Jessica from Marshfield. Ten and a half acres. Lots of tall, skinny ashes. Okay. So, we're working with an arborist. Excellent. And just doing surveillance, but I wanted to know if I should be, like, I just want to be better informed. Sure. And know if there's other strategies I should use. Great, excellent. And then you all are from the library, the Department of Libraries. And residents of Montpelier. And residents of Montpelier and East Montpelier. Okay, excellent. Fantastic. Okay, great. So, I can talk about EAB ad nauseam. So, it's just good to get a lay of the land and to know who's in the room. So, you can kind of tailor, if you have questions, as we're going along, feel free to interject. I am by training an urban forester. So, I mostly in Vermont deal with trees along the right-of-way and trees on town-owned land. So, we're talking about trees around your libraries and your town offices, buildings, and on the town greens, around schools, parks, et cetera. But mostly for the purposes of EAB, we're really talking about within the right-of-way. So, does anyone not know what I mean when I say right-of-way? This is along the roads. Okay. So, I'm going to start with two really important websites if you have never been to either of these or if you don't know about them. These are your two spots to go to in Vermont for Emerald Ashport information. vteenbasives.org is the spot. It's the hot spot to go. This is where you'd go... Are we connected internet in this room? Or do we know? I can check. Well, we'll just check. Because if we are, then that'll be... It looks like... Yeah, okay, great. So, I might just pop here real quick and go to vteenbasives. So, this site... The things that I just want to make sure everybody's aware of, these are kind of your takeaways from the presentation, is that the big one is if you think you have Emerald Ashport or if someone you know, someone in your town comes to you and says, we've got it on our property, we need to know about that or we would like to know about that. The state's monitoring efforts for the current infestation and new infestations, we have limited capacity to be on the ground. So, we're really dependent upon people actually reporting it. And there's this fun button here called report it. And basically what it does is you can say, hey, I think I found an insect. I think it's EAB or signs of EAB. I think it's Emerald Ashport by clicking here. And then it gives you a big picture. So, if you think you actually found the insect, it shows you what it should look like. It also gives you a link to all the look-alike pests that we often get. People are confused that it might be EAB. And then you still think it's Emerald Ashport. Then it allows you to submit a photograph of the insect or the signs on the tree if you're looking at a tree that you think is infested. The location, your name. And where this goes when you submit it is to not only the partners at the Department of Forest Parks and Recreation but our partners at UVM Extension at USDA AFIS and at the Agency of Agriculture, Food and Market. So it's going to all those partners so then everybody can kind of convene and say, okay, who wants to take this one? Who wants to go check it out if it looks suspect or if it's not actually EAB who wants to respond to this request? So that's one really awesome thing about this site. The other thing that you all should be aware of is that this, we have a whole section on Emerald Ashport here and so I'm going to be referring to a lot of documents that are on this website throughout the talk. I didn't bring paper copies, but we have resources by audience. So forest landowners, for those of you who have actual forest land that has ash in it, here's information if you're in current use and you want to know about how EAB is going to impact your forest management plan, you can go here. If you are a homeowner and just have a couple trees around your property, you can go here and I'm going to talk about a lot of this stuff in the presentation but really gives you some step-by-steps. If you're a volunteer and somebody from your town asks you to give a presentation on Emerald Ashport, we have an EAB basics PowerPoint presentation with notes that's already recorded for you so you can just steal it and use it in your town and it has all the correct information in there. So this is a great website and the last thing I'll just note is that there's this other button called the list serve sign-up and this is for our EAB updates list serve. You sign up for this and the only time you're ever going to get an email is when either a new infestation has been detected in the state so as soon as it's confirmed, the email blast will go out to everybody on that email list serve or if there's been a change in the federal quarantine or for example, we sent one out a little earlier this year because in the state of Vermont we just changed the official flight season for Emerald Ashport from starting on May 1st to starting on June 1st. So that's just a good thing for folks to be aware of that that flight season is shortened in Vermont because of our colder climate and shorter growing season. So that's VT Invasives and then just to quickly show you the other site which is vtcommunityforestry.org that's our program's website from our Urban and Community Forestry and a couple things to note here all from a couple different towns here so one thing that's good to know about is that we have Emerald Ashport planning grants that are now active. We had 20 recipients this year. Here's all the towns that are getting funding from us. They're pretty small. It's only $2,000 a piece but just some seed money for communities that want to do some planning. Municipalities and nonprofits are eligible not private homeowners but just East Montpelier is one of our recipients this year. So you can see that generally gets announced in November, December and then the other piece on here is we have this whole section on Emerald Ashport management. A lot of these resources are on both websites so they're on that vt invasive site as well but because our program is really focused on assisting communities and municipalities this has more on the municipal planning resources treatment, insecticide treatment resources, budgeting and then we've worked with several towns in the past couple of years to write management plans or preparedness plans so these are all linked to the town so these are examples of communities that have actually established a plan so Montpelier is actually one of our really has been a very active community in Emerald Ashport planning. Those of you that live here probably have heard a lot about it but since probably 2012 or 2013 your tree board has been really active and being ready to prepare for the past. So just wanted to start with those two websites and now we'll go back to the presentation. I'm gonna talk a little bit about the pests to start off with and this is not a life-sized replica of EAB but this is actually a costume that one of our volunteers who lives in Johnson, Vermont made for the program a couple years ago and it's been a great outreach tool because it's funny and anybody can wear it so the story of EAB in Vermont is just unfolding. That's something that I like to preface with and I also like to preface with in an ideal situation EAB is not gonna be a big deal for you and the reason that I say that is because right now we're at the cusp of the infestation we are just starting to deal with it and if you make a plan for your trees it could be a homeowner, a forest landowner or a municipality, if you have a plan in place we have time now. It's not gonna be for another eight, nine years before we start really seeing the high mortality rates across the state so we have time, if you make a plan now you know what your course of action is once you know the infestation is on your property or in your neighborhood or in your community that is my hope. So hopefully it's not a big deal. From the other 30 some states that have been dealing with EAB we know that that's not always the case and there are communities that have gone bankrupt because of the impacts of this pest. There are home insurers that have sent letters to their insurers saying if you don't remove the ash trees that are in proximity to your house we won't insure you anymore. So it's good to be aware we're here now it's all about EAB awareness this is National EAB Awareness Week and the best thing for us in Vermont to be doing right now is again making sure people know about EAB know where their ash trees are and have a plan in place and a course of action for what they're gonna do when they need to make a decision about those trees. This is a better representation of the pest itself and I'm actually gonna go ahead and send around I have two sets of a pair of vials one with the adult EAB and one with the larvae so I'll send one around here and I'll send one around here and you'll see right off the bat that the adult is really small it's a really small insect it's about the size of a penny you could sit it on a penny so just about half an inch long and the scientific name is a grilis plantapenis it hails from eastern Asia so Korea, Japan China, Russia that's where the native habitat of this pest is and there really wasn't much known about it at all until it landed here in the US and the reason for that is that in its native habitat it's kept in check by natural predators it's the ash trees the native ash trees in its native habitat are adapted to deal with this so much like our native ash borers our native beetles here they're not an issue so there really wasn't much research that had been done about them but it's been here in the US since the mid-90s first detected in 2002 in Detroit and we know that it feeds on all species of ash which is the genus Fraxinus so all species of ash trees are susceptible and if they are untreated over 99% of trees of trees in the US will die ash trees in the US so there's very very little natural resistance in our native ash species in the US so it's a hard number to swallow but it's over 99% the adult is actually not what kills the tree it's a marginal leaf feeder so it does feed on ash leaves but it's not the defoliation of the tree is not what kills the tree what kills the tree is the larvae so that wormy looking kind of beige insect that is walking around the room right now and how it kills the tree is that as it's growing underneath the bark as it's moving through the different larval stages and becoming an adult it's feeding on the cambial layer of the tree so this is if you know anything about tree biology this is the layer right underneath the bark where all of the nutrient and water exchange is happening within that tree so the roots are getting water and they're pulling nutrients from the soil they're sending those up to the branches so that the leaves can photosynthesize those leaves are photosynthesizing creating food sending those carbohydrates down to the roots so that whole tree can function and all of that's happening right underneath the bark layer in this active live cambial layer and that's what EAB larvae really like to eat so that's what they're feeding on so the other thing that I'm going to send around now are a couple of samples of the wood where you can see these characteristic S-shaped galleries so EAB is really if you've ever thrown wood into your wood stove or looked to explore a piece of a log of wood or a piece of downward in the forest these might look somewhat familiar most wood-boring beetles make some kind of feeding gallery but the EAB is very distinctive in this very curvy S-shaped design in their feeding galleries so I'll send some of these around as well and this is what kills the tree eventually because it essentially is cutting off the circulatory system of the tree over time so if you have one or two EAB in a tree that tree could live for a very long time but as the population in an individual tree reaches a density that's when it essentially becomes riddled and it cuts off the circulatory system so this is just explaining a little further what I just mentioned but this is the life cycle of the EAB so the flight season of Vermont when the adults are emerging and they're active again is from June 1st until September 30th so that's our active flight season so this is when those adults are emerging this is, you know, not actual size because, you know, very small but they're emerging out they're feeding on the leaves when the females lay their eggs they go kind of walk back over start in the canopy first because that's where they're feeding it's near the leaves so the infestation will start up in the canopy and move down the trunk of the tree over time as it becomes more crowded there's less real estate in the canopy they'll start moving down to the trunk of the tree so they'll lay their eggs the larvae will hatch and they burrow directly underneath the bark and here they go through their different larval stages and they'll overwinter for one to two years so at low density they'll sometimes overwinter for two years and at higher densities they'll overwinter for just one year so they're just staying for one winter then they're emerging and starting the whole cycle again so that's the general life cycle and these are some of the pests that from our experience people have mistaken to be EAB so this is the actual emerald ash borer up here it's very iridescent so it's unique in that sense it has a really flat head the top and you guys have seen it's very small again so it's hard to actually distinguish these small features but this is actually the one that in my experience most people have mistaken for EAB, the tiger beetle but something like a metallic wood borer also looks quite similar to an EAB so this is why it's important that we have these posted up on that website and again if you think you're what you're looking at is emerald ash borer report it and then we'll make sure it's better to send it in and be wrong then to second guess yourself and not send something in I'm gonna go over some of the signs and you guys out on the table out there one of the posters we have available that we sent out to all the the department of libraries sent out to all of the libraries in the state for us is this new poster we have that highlights how to identify ash trees and then also what are the signs of EAB from our experience here so we've first detected EAB in Vermont in February of 2018 so just over a year ago and it's really hard to see these early signs of infestation so what happens when a new infestation is detected is that the state so FPR and our partners we do a visual survey of all of the roads in that town so the first infestation was in Groton so the state split up everybody into cars we had like four people in each car and drove every single road in that town to do a delineation survey so basically any trees that ash trees stop and look and decide if those might be infested with EAB I was part of this process up in Milton because there's a South Hero infestation so all the towns around each infestation are also surveyed and just an experience of being in that car for eight hours and looking at ash trees for a day it's really hard to see signs of early infestation of EAB compounded by the fact that ash in general if you know the species at all has a lot of other issues ash yellows there's a white fungus that grows on the bark the bark of ash if it's rubbed it kind of will fleck off to an extent so you might think you're seeing a sign that's actually not a sign of EAB and ash also grows really well in disturbed soils so green ash particularly along that right of way and that's not necessarily always the most healthy habitat for a tree so they kind of look gnarly anyway so all this being said we get requests sometimes from folks saying I really want to see like an infested site so I can go check it out and we are again at such an early phase that we're really not seeing it widespread I can't tell you go look at this stand of ash and you'll see it it's really hard to see but I'm going to go through the signs kind of in timeline order of when they're going to show up when you're looking at an individual tree so the first thing you're likely going to see is woodpecker flucking so woodpeckers like to eat the larvae and remember they're just underneath the bark so if you're seeing deep large woodpecker holes that are going into the heartwood of the tree that's not likely signs of EAB the tree is decayed for some of the reason and they're going after something else a little further in but just right under the bark so what that looks like is what we call bonding so it's just this flucking off of the top layer of bark just so you can get right under that bark and get the larvae and like I said before the infestation will likely start in the canopy upper canopy and move down so this would be something you'd see higher up in the tree to get it at eye level the next thing that would happen because if you think about the impact on the tree is that the canopy will start to thin out the circulation that circulatory system that exchange of nutrients and water is being impacted so the leaves aren't getting what they need to photosynthesize and likewise those nutrients aren't coming back down so you'll start to see this canopy fitting through what the timeline of this kind of looks like but this is going to be the next sign bark splitting is another thing that you might start to notice higher up in the tree so when the larvae starts to burrow and is eating in those feeding galleries the tree will try to repair that damage and sometimes how that manifests is the bark actually splits around those feeding galleries so this is another sign as the tree starts to get really stressed out because it's not getting its food source it will send out epicormic branches or water sprouts and these are really common on a species like crab apples you see them all the time and it's just how that species kind of jams to put out water sprouts but on ash you'd see them kind of concentrated right in the core of the tree or down around the base and this is that tree trying to put out as much green as possible so it can actually feed itself and then we used to say this as the first one but now we say it as one of the last is looking for the actual exit holes so when the larvae is finished developing when they emerge as adults they come out in D shaped exit holes so I'm going to send one last sample around and because that ash borer has a really flat top of the head the shape of the exit hole is very distinctly D it's not an oval it's not a circle it is a D but it's very small and again the infestation starting in the canopy and moving down so to see these from the ground up in the top of the tree you can see them at eye level that infestation has probably been going on for quite some time and then the last thing you'd look for and the reason this would be the last one is because you have to peel the bark to be able to see it are those S shaped galleries so this is when we get when we get a call in saying we think the tree is infested we go through all those other signs first and then if it looks like it's probably a positive then we would ask for permission from the landowner or from the municipality to peel the bark and actually start looking for some of these galleries so this is this is that S shape S shape and then do a couple more peels and you get a little bit more deeper see very meandering that's just that feeding pattern so those are the signs and symptoms in Vermont switching a little bit to our ash population so FIA is forest inventory analysis and that's how we have an estimate of any species distribution in the state so these are long term monitoring plots done by the forest service and that data tells us that we have about 5 to 7% of our forest cover is ash and the three species we have in Vermont are white ash, green ash and black ash there are 16 species across the U.S. across North America I should say but those are the three that we have in Vermont white, green and black we know that it's about 5 to 7% of our forest trees and that's about 160 million trees and it's scattered in distribution across the state so this is an important point to note that there are many stands like up in the island so Grand Isle County where an individual stand could be comprised of up to 70% of ash so in some places it's just scattered across the landscape but there are other places in the state where it makes up a much larger component and they will be impacted more heavily than elsewhere white ash has market value the lumber is used for flooring for handles for bats so there are concerns around making sure that if you are going to harvest that the wood still has value I'm going to talk about forest land this is outside of my wheel house I'm an urban forester so specific questions around timber lumber and civil cultural management of ash I'll go over it but those are questions for your county forester or for one of our utilization foresters in our urban forest so when I say urban I know people are like what we're in Vermont but what I'm really meaning is places where people and trees are intersecting so this is again along the right of way rural right of way is included within that so we've done a lot of tree inventory work in our downtowns so worked with about 35 towns since I've been with the program for the last six or seven years to inventory their downtown trees and through that we're able to pull out exact numbers of how many ash and where those ash are so just some examples of a place like Hyde Park they've got four ash trees in their public space in their downtown so it's not a big deal for them at all like they those are ash trees that aren't actually not that large so but whereas you have another community like Burlington has over 1200 mostly green ash that are planted in the green strip in front of homes in residential areas in our parks and we have a resident of Burlington and I'll talk a little bit more about what Burlington's doing or a place like S Extruction which is a village it's a small municipality and they still have 141% or 17% of all of their trees that are planted and managed in town are ash so they have some decisions to make too these two down here these are examples of rural right of way so these are surveys along the rural roads that I know East Montpelier and I don't know Marshfield you guys are doing I know Plainfield in discussions and my colleague Joanne is going to be working with Plainfield to do to conduct a rural inventory so just a sense like the town of Randolph estimates they have about 6000 ash trees of over 6 inches in diameter along their rural right of way so this is the larger concern on my end in my perspective just understanding that for a lot of our rural communities whose vegetation management along that right of way is generally taken care of by their road crew or by public works department or the road foreman that now this is another thing on top of their plate that they need to be thinking about just some information about this is silvics of white ash one thing that I think is interesting and I didn't mention is that ash in general is a really good stump sprouter so even when trees come down they shoot up stump sprouts EAB will infest one inch stems so there was a thought at the beginning of this infestation in the Midwest in Michigan EAB will run out of food and then it'll leave that part of the world and it'll move elsewhere and then we can regenerate the second generation of ash and what we're finding is that it's persisting on the landscape because ash that are dying are sending up sprouts and those are becoming infested so it's not likely that it is more likely than not that EAB is here in North America to stay for the long haul not the best news but it's good that we know that ash is generally a pretty fast growing tree but white ash doesn't bear seed until 20 years so that's another important thing to think about is that is that losing our large diameter 20 year old ash in the long haul is going to provide many gaps in our forests and they're never going to get big again and I will say I'll talk about this a little bit later but there is some resistance to EAB so the little bubble of hope on the horizon is that a very small percentage of native ash trees are displaying tolerance if not resistance so the difference there is tolerance is like they won't die in five years an individual tree might last 10 to 15 years so it's fighting back it eventually will succumb but it's fighting back and very very rarely resistance to EAB so there is certainly a case for leaving trees standing if they're not going to pose a threat to your house to people that are walking on a trail if you don't need to get an economic return on those trees by selling it for firewood or lumber etc there is a case to be made that there could be resistance on our landscape so the only way we're going to find out about that is if we leave trees standing a little bit on ash ID no you're ash from your elbow so this again it's interesting as someone who works in urban forestry and has touched a lot of green ash trees in my lifetime I don't think about ash ID because to me it's just so easy to see and our feedback from workshops that we've done from our county foresters who are on the ground working with private landowners is that the most questions we're getting in year one is not how do I see the signs of EAB it's what's an ash tree what does it look like so we're really kind of shifting focus to spend a little bit more time when we're training volunteers when we're doing these kind of talks to talk about what an ash tree actually looks like because if you don't know what it looks like then we can't move forward with any planning for the past so I'll just go through some slides you know it's a deciduous tree it has a pretty full crown and in the winter time it's really easy to for me it's much more easy to ID ash in the winter when the leaves are off them in the summer and the main reason is that the twigs on ash they stay thick all the way to the end they're stubby and so you can kind of see it here that they don't taper out like with a maple or an elm the actual as the tree branches out they get thinner and whisperer but with ash that doesn't happen they just stay pretty thick all the way down it's also opposite branching instead of alternate so the branches come off the buds come off the main stems directly across from each other opposed to with most species deciduous species you have it kind of up and down alternating across the branch so in Vermont the other species and our native species that do that are the maple species so if you can tell the difference between a maple and an ash then you're in a good place to start with fall foliage wise the white ash have a really beautiful like maroon color and the green ash generally start with a yellow and deep into a darker orange the bark is pretty characteristic but it looks like a lot of other things I'm gonna go through some look-alikes real quick and our leaf is it's a compound leaf with five to nine leaflets so these are all little leaflets and it has one terminal leaf here that has a nice point at the end this is a flower actually of an ash there it's an inconspicuous flower but they do flower it's a wind pollinated species so it's not pollinated by insects trees that we see often confused with ash boxelder is a big one it's a maple so this is an acer not it's in the maple family but it has a compound leaf which is different from a maple tree so this is the ash over here this is the boxelder there are you know the way the ash leaf doesn't have any lobes whereas on the boxelder you'll have these little tiny lobes that are like the maple leaf has those lobes we actually had a woman in charlotte that paid an arborist a lot of money to treat three boxelder trees for emerald ash borer so this is something we heard from the midwest that was going to happen here that people would come in and say oh we can treat your trees but this individual didn't even identify the trees correctly so she got her money back and you know got some expert opinion on that but that's something that we just want to again the first step is making sure you know exactly what tree is going to be impacted and it's only ash trees mountain ash is another one just because of the name that people often will confuse with ash it's confusing but it's actually not a fraxinus it's sorbus is the genus so this is a tree that will not be impacted by eab walnut sometimes because of the bark looks somewhat similar and also has that compound leaf hickory not shag bark definitely hopefully not because shag bark hickory has such distinct bark but that's just one example and a yellow wood which is not something you'd find in the woods here that's an urban tree as with Kentucky Coffetry we don't see that in the woods here so a little bit about I've been mentioning that we're here on the cusp so this is the general the timeline of what eab has played out in the 30 some other states that now has so what we're generally seeing is so we assume that in the central infestation which I'll show the map in a little bit but the Montpelier Groton Plainfield Orange that whole area of the infestation it's probably been here for three to four years in those areas so what we're really seeing is that the population is going to crest around eight to nine years so the population will build and following that is going to be the death curve where the highest mortality of ash is going to happen so that's coming around year ten is when just behind that population bump you'll see that the large bump in mortality of the ash trees and this is how it plays out on a tree to tree basis five years from infestation to death of the tree if it's not treated and five years so you're zero healthy tree year one trees infested you're not going to see signs of this you're two infested you're probably not seeing signs of it you're three you might just start to see some dieback and some of that woodpecker two or three years before you can visually see what's happening by year four you get this thinning and dieback and by year five the tree is dead so it's very fast so you may really only have three years from when you're seeing signs to when the tree has to come to EAB so you can treat up to the general rule of thumb the general rule of thumb is about if more than 30% of the canopy is looking thin it's probably too late because then you're likely here so what we're really recommending is if you want to treat trees if you're within the infested area on our map this is you should do it this year yeah so I'll talk about I'll get into what that looks like I talked about this already so this is that um tolerant and resistance there are crossbreeding programs that are already established in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois so there are people that are going out finding those trees that are showing some tolerance or resistance taking cuttings from them going back crossbreeding them with the native Asian varieties of ash so much like we've learned with chestnut and American Elm these crossbreeding programs at least allow us to have some degree of native ash on the landscape for the long haul but again this is it's not appropriate in my view to leave trees if they're going to impact human safety or property if they could cause property damage so this is a case for leaving trees out in the woods where they can't cause any risk zipping through a little bit of the history we already covered a lot of this but these are all every red dot represents a county that now has EAB so this is the this might need a new update but they update this pretty regularly emeraldashboardinfo.org is the website where I get a lot of this stuff um it's the national EAB but it's in 35 states and 5 Canadian provinces it is here it's not we are not eradicating this pest from the US um it moves about 1 mile it'll fly for food so if it can't find any ash it'll fly 1 to 2 miles the adult well um in a year but we know that if that was the case that it was only naturally flying it would take over 400 years for EAB to get from Michigan to Vermont or to New England and it took less than a decade for it to show up in New England so we know that we're spreading EAB um if you think about the life cycle of the pest it's right under the bark it's overwintering people cut down trees ash is a great firewood throw it in the back of their truck drive it to their camp their hunting camp or in the summer when they're camping three states away that's how it's moving um we don't have obviously much data to say if it's more firewood versus you know wood packing products versus along our rail lines but um the south hero infestation popped up at a public at a private campground so we know that firewood is a big way that this is traveling we have a firewood quarantine in Vermont since 2015 it's really hard to enforce if you don't have all of the campgrounds on board um this is just an example of a colleague of mine um was at a wood fired pizza place in Salem Massachusetts before EAB was in Massachusetts and he went up and just started kicking around the pile and lo and behold found this piece of ashwood with a very obvious gallery this wood was heat treated so he did not bring EAB this is not the introduction of EAB to Massachusetts but just just goes to show that it's very easy to transport it and think of all the places that use wood for heating um I'm gonna skip this cause we're running out of time but this is our Vermont map um so there's been a lot of confusion on how to read this map so I'm just gonna give you the quick and dirty each red dot so each red circle represents a five mile radius around a known infested tree so there is a known infested tree in South Hero we draw a five mile radius around that that red area um it is more likely than not that EAB is active in that area and has been here for a while the orange, the yolk we call these the eggs but the orange is another five miles out beyond that border so it is likely that EAB is in that area so these are the towns where we know EAB is in Barrie, Grotton, Montpelier, Orange, Plainfield, South Hero and Stanford the areas in the red are these towns and then these are our high risk areas where it's likely that it's gonna pop up we are just getting into the flight season June 1st so this map will likely change a lot this year um if you want to be in the loop then you go back to that EAB updates listserv um our state decided to not adopt a county by county quarantine some other states have done so uh it has has been um most of the states that have started with the county why quarantine end up dropping it over time again it's really hard to enforce we're a small state with limited capacity and resources so what we've decided to put our energy into is making sure people are aware of ways that they can slow the spread by having these recommendations if you're moving wood, if you're moving ash wood from an infested area to a non-infested area we have guidelines on VT invasives about how to do that if you're hiring an arborist to come clear some of your ash trees there are guidelines and recommendations on how to most safely remove dispose of that wood without impacting a non-infested area so slow the spread is the big message where is that resource? um vtinvasives.org there's a whole section called slow the spread and there's about 7 different sheets that give you if you want to treat your wood what are the specifications of that treatment heat treating or bark removal etc that's all on that website um there is a federal quarantine for all the states all 35 states are within a federal quarantine that will likely be dropped next year there are um it is it's kind of a lost cause as far as the federal government is concerned eab is they can't control it and there are some other pests on the horizon like the spotted lantern fly anybody anybody that is impacting New York and Pennsylvania right now that the federal government is being focused from eab on to this this new pest um non stop um we we have been for years and years working to detect eab you may have seen these purple prism traps or these green funnel traps um these actually were were set by USDA aphis that program is getting defunded so this year we we're doing something new we're actually asked volunteers to set the traps and record and monitor the traps which is kind of a really cool thing we have about 50 people across the state that are coming to trainings they're going to put the traps up around their town or on their property um they'll they'll do the surveying and the monitoring of the traps and then they'll take them down so um you know for years said oh they're not effective but the Stamford Vermont infestation they found two eab on purple traps they haven't have yet to find a tree that is infested or that they can see that's infested but those were found on purple traps um we sacrifice ash trees so this is something we do at the beginning of the flight season actually girdle it's called a trap tree so you girdle the tree this is something you can do on your private property too for those of you have who have land um there are I believe on the BT invasives are um guidelines for how to establish a trap tree essentially you're girdling the tree you stress it out it's it's easy food for the eab so they'll be attracted to the pheromones the trees putting out they infest that tree you cut it down at the end of the flight season and peel the bark and then you can monitor how many eab are in that tree um and also then you burn it and then you kill all those larvae so it's another way to kind of slow the spread um as far as making a plan which is I'm sure what all of you really want to do when you go home today you have three options and that's I mean it's pretty simple we can get into all the details but the three options are you treat the tree with an insecticide you remove the tree either before it's infested or as it's starting to show signs um or you do nothing and this last option again is only appropriate if it's not going to impact human safety or property um it's really important to know that eab impact trees that are infested with eab um they lose the wood loses its integrity really quickly and I've heard um the anecdote that I will say is that um um uh ash trees that have been killed by eab at year five have the structural integrity of a styrofoam cup they are very dangerous to work in they are brittle and they shatter so they don't behave like normal trees when they die um so if you're going to wait to remove the tree um you have to be really really careful a lot of the arborist companies will not climb an ash tree anymore they will only remove ash trees that are they will not climb ash tree in the winter when they can't see the foliage they will um only remove an ash tree by crane um in the wintertime or by lift so that means the price is going to go up if it's showing more than like 25% canopy um loss so this is an argument for um planning ahead of time and having a plan in place there are communities such as charlotte that are actually preemptively removing their rural right of way trees because they do not want to be in a situation in eight years when they have thousands of dead ash trees along their right of way and um the cost of those trees is astronomically higher than it would be while they're still alive now so these are decisions that individual entities a homeowner a landowner a municipality makes based on their risk threshold and based on how many ash trees they have that they know that they're going to have to make a decision about yeah well no I mean do I think that for municipalities you know you're there's a perception about insecticide so do people are people into that in your community are they okay with chemically injecting trees um you have to treat every other year for the life of the tree so it's a long term commitment so um it's a great for homeowners I think it's a really great option if you have a high value ash tree on your property that you want to preserve it actually could be cheaper to treat that tree over time than to remove it between two houses or by a utility line or it's large diameter it actually could be cheaper over time so it's not always this is not always the more expensive option um for me for municipalities which just concerns me is that long term commitment because you have one one year where the budgets um impacted for some other reason and you can't treat that year and then all the years ahead of that that you treated are just a wash so it's that's the big piece is that it is a long term commitment um but they're very effective the chemicals the um insecticides that the two that the state of Vermont is is recommending are these two there are many others on the market so this is another thing we really don't want homeowners going on to amazon dot com and putting in eab killer um because there are bark sprees and foliar sprees and soil drenches that are full of um you know lord knows what kind of chemicals that um that are really dose dependent that that really should only these should be applied by professionals hire a certified arborist these chemicals you need to be certified by the state of Vermont agency of agriculture to apply pesticides and these two are the non neonicotinoid options which means they are they will have the lowest impact on pollinators possible as far as they will they chemical they will have an impact on um anything that's feeding on that tree but um eab included in that so it's again a decision that you need to weigh your values versus your long term goal for the trees um and it's it do you do need to do it every two years it does go down to every three years once the populations go down um but I'm gonna have just a couple minutes so what I just want to real quick I'm gonna skip over forest land I'm sorry I just want to go to the budget sheet because I think you're probably curious about costs um inventorying is really important so for those of you Montpelier has had an inventory forever East Montpelier is doing one playing field we're gonna do one marsh field we'll get there so this is just you know we're working with a lot of towns now we have an app that you can download on a smart phone we have iPads that we loan out to towns to do inventory just so you have an idea of what your numbers are um this is the budget sheet so um for removals it's it we don't have great data on what rural road side removals costs or what um removals in like a high density ash situation look like this is from the forest service if you have this is talking about like individual trees that an arborist would come and take down um I've for like rural road situation or dense situation I know some arborists are actually walk walk they have to walk that specific mile of road or half mile of road and um give a price like per quarter mile dependent on the density and this elevation and the size of the trees etc um the insecticide treatment which is probably the price point that you're most interested in hearing about um it should be if you're hiring a certified arborist to do it it should be between 12 and 15 dollars um per diameter inch of tree and you really don't want to treat anything less than 10 inches in diameter um that unless it's a tree that has extremely high personal significance to you and you really want to keep that tree but so if you had a 20 inch tree at um 12 dollars your that's 240 bucks every every other year to treat that tree um the low end in this the 3 dollars places like Montpelier like Rutland city they are having city staff um get their insecticide license pesticide applicators license and they can buy the chemical direct because they are now licensed to do so so that allows place like Rutland city who is treating 100 of their street trees over the long term that allows them to do that at that $3 price point and not at the $15 per diameter inch price point. This information is all up on our website um just really quickly some examples of what's happening you know Montpelier again has been extremely active um in inventorying the ash trees they have a plan for slowing the spread um the infested the infested trees in Montpelier are up on national life's campus at the agency of natural resources headquarters which is a little ironic found by our state forest health lead um the 3 trees that are were visibly infested have been removed and the other trees around that have been treated but um the whole the woods between national life and downtown there's going to be a lot of monitoring that's happening in there this summer they're hanging a bunch of traps because they just want to make sure they're aware of where the how that population is moving into into town Williston um in 2015 did an inventory 51% of their street trees were ash green ash on this wildfire circle 99 40% of the trees were ash they have been preemptively removing and replacing those trees since 2015 so that's an approach that this community is taking and again that's just um they're taking care of it's not going to be an issue for them once it gets to Williston because all of their green ash are going to be gone um Sherlock again I mentioned they're doing the first community that I know of that sent out an actual RFP um for preemptive rural rural ash tree removal um and they have a really active tree warden and this is they have a tree warden charlotte tree warden website where if you're looking for resources from a town that's really actively planning that's more rural not a city they're a great example of how they're engaging the community um um and I talked about Rowland City the cool thing that's happening in Burlington is that um I live in a neighborhood that's very close to another neighborhood that has 100% green ash on their streets and what the city is doing is actually they're not removing anything now they're not going to treat anything but they're inter-planting with a diversity of about 15 species so that once EAB and this is something a landowner could do a homeowner can start you could plant a small tree now understanding that within 10 years that ash is going to be gone and you want to have something there that can take over for it so those are just some strategies um I already showed you our websites and the last thing I'll just mention I know we're over time is that um we're doing a really cool um kind of collaboration with Vermont Land Trust where we're starting to gather stories about notable ash trees in the state um we have a web or an email address started up called it's at ash at vlt.org and we're really at this point just seeking stories, photos, poems anecdotes about these these magnificent and notable ash trees across the state um because we know that they're there I hear from people in workshops all the time my grandma planted this ash tree on our property and it's now 85 years old and it's next to the house and you know those are the kind of things that we're really looking for and we're going to uh have some big exhibit at some point but for now we're just collecting the stories um your five takeaways vt. invasives eab is going to kill ash trees we're on the cusp of the infestation the first step in planning is knowing how to ID and do an inventory um we can protect high value trees we can keep ash on the landscape we just need to be in a planning mode and then um eab infested trees are risky so stay safe I'm over but that's it and if anybody has any final questions or um I have a quick question when you do sample the bark on living trees does that create any long term damage to the tree? yes that's why it's the last you know we're only going to appeal the bark if we're pretty sure we're very sure that we're going to find a gallery yeah if you said I'll put the it goes into the little sprouts whatever I guess you remove those when you remove the big tree as well? well they come up after so they would they would they would sprout after that tree has been cut down so then you have to go cut those down you're just maintaining yeah okay so you never really cool the root exactly it is eventually going to spread throughout the state I think it's inevitable how do you see that cycle taking? um I think it depends a lot on how seriously people take the slow the spread recommendations um you know it's there are Wisconsin has had EAB for maybe 10 12 years and it's still confined to a very small area of the state they've been really diligent about making sure what is infested was not leaving an area so and then there are other states that haven't been so successful in doing that and it's spread very rapidly so there's no way to know I think it's we're depending a lot on people following our guidelines and really keeping an eye on how the populations are moving and growing is there any way to develop a ash poor resistant tree? well that's that's that crossbreeding so that's happening so they're taking trees that are showing some tolerance or resistance naturally of the Native U.S. species they're taking cuttings from those taking the Native Asian varieties and crossbreeding them so they're developing essentially new species of ash that will be resistant but are not yet on the landscape yeah so there's hope thank you all