The city of Kettering, which has been chemically protecting 200 of the approximately 1,500 ash trees that grow in parks and on other city properties since 2008, is wrapping up the 2012 treatments in locations including Polen Farm, Indian Riffle Park, Ireland Park and the grounds of the government center.
Parks supervisor Mike Fleener said the prognosis for saving the trees has improved and the cost of doing so has come down.
The city spends about $3,000 a year for a chemical that is sprayed on the trunks of ash trees to repel the borers.
“The way we do this is relatively quick and has a low impact, which is important because we are working in public areas,” Fleener said.
The borer has arrived in Kettering.
“We just took down a tree in one of our parks that showed every sign of the infestation,” Fleener said.
In neighboring Oakwood, which will spend about $30,000 in 2012 to inject more than 530 trees with a systemic insecticide, “We have not had any evidence of EAB. I know it’s getting closer,” said Carol Collins, director of leisure services.
Injections were delayed by cold weather, “which would have made the uptake slower,” she said.
Buckeye Ecocare, one of several area businesses that homeowners hire to protect their trees if they don’t do that themselves, discovered EAB in ash on its property in Centerville during the week of April 23.
“We have been injecting ash trees in the Miami Valley since the discovery of EAB in Montgomery, Warren and Greene counties. Unfortunately, we did not treat ours in 2011,” said owner Mark Grunkemeyer.
“It has not had wide visible impact in most places with the exception of Springboro, where there has been extensive tree infestation and die-back the last few years,” said Brian Huber, a certified arborist for the company.
“We found active EAB in Centerville and Kettering for the first time last year. I expect more widespread sightings this year.”
Wright State University is a partner in a long-term research project seeking a more permanent solution than temporary pesticides — breeding an American tree that resists the borer the way China’s less-desirable Manchurian ash does.
Don Cipollini, a professor of biological sciences at WSU, said the U.S. Forestry Service, Ohio State and Michigan State universities also are part of an effort that eventually may allow partial restoration of the North American ash. Chad Rigsby, an environmental sciences doctoral student, is leading WSU lab testing of whether “lingering ashes,” those that have remained healthy and unaffected after the borers decimated most other trees in the area, have an innate bio-chemical resistance other trees don’t.
The overall project will attempt to repeatedly cross-breed American ash trees with Chinese trees to produce an almost completely North American ash that has the Chinese tree’s genome to resist the EAB.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2377 or tmorris@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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