DaytonDailyNews.com

Today, north of Zanesville in Muskingum County, Ohio University students and researchers will engage in the largest single planting of American chestnut trees on public land in the state.

The sowing of the 1,200 seedlings on three acres of the 16,200-acre Tri-Valley Wildlife Area is part of a new phase by experts to restore the nearly vanished American chestnut in Ohio.

They're calling their efforts reforestation, an important change in terms as small-scale plantings of test trees give way to reclaiming strip-mined lands where thousands of trees could be planted this year.

Ohio has 35,000 acres of abandoned strip-mine lands in need of reclamation where chestnuts could be planted, said John Husted, a natural resource administrator with the Division of Mineral Resources Management. The acreage is viewed as prime for the reintroduction of chestnuts.

The first step in the pilot project occurred this week when heavy machinery was used to rip and plow the acreage. Underwritten with a $100,000 grant from the U.S. Department of the Interior's Office of Surface Mines, the planting is in cooperation with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and Miami University.

Carolyn Keiffer, vice president of the Ohio Chapter of The American Chestnut Foundation and a professor at Miami University, said the chestnut trees are mostly 15/16th hybrids. That means they have nearly all the characteristics of American chestnuts but with the fungal blight resistance of Chinese chestnuts bred into them. Genetically, they are 1/16th Chinese.

Today's planting is the second large-scale effort in Ohio, Keiffer said. In 2006, 2,400 chestnut seeds were planted during the year on private strip-mine land.

An Asian fungal blight wiped out the American chestnut in Ohio in the 1930s. American chestnut trees, which grow as tall as 100 feet, once made up a quarter of forest hardwoods from Maine to Florida, towering over 200 million acres.

Another big project in the works this year is the establishment of an American chestnut nursery to cultivate a new generation derived from Ohio's surviving trees. Some surviving trees were identified in the wild by the foundation's chapter during a search in 2005.

Plans are to establish the nursery at Mohican State Forest with ODNR help. Planning begins this spring, said Andy Ware, assistant chief of forestry.

"We look at the restoration of the American chestnuts to Ohio's forest as a top issue," he said.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-7407

or sbennish@DaytonDailyNews.com.