“The entire city of Kettering has got issues with the emerald ash borer, so these trees are spread out all over the city,” Matt Byrd, parks manager for Kettering, told the Dayton Daily News.
Kettering started treating infected ash trees in 2008, Byrd said.
“We started out treating about 200. Now we’re treating about 500 to 600,” he said.
The parks department spent $2,000 a year to treat trees with pesticides from 2009 to 2011. However, it changed its strategy from treating trees to save them, to treating them to slow their rate of decline between 2011 and 2012. By 2014, the department more than doubled its budget for treatment to $5,000.
The city started removing infected trees in 2011 and has taken out about 350 since then, Byrd said.
“We still have some that we’re going to continue to treat because of their size and their location, but we’ve shifted now. We still treat trees with the idea that we’re slowing their rate of decline to give us more time to remove those trees,” Byrd explained.
The parks department expects to remove 216 trees in 2015, 63 trees in 2016, and 117 in 2017.
“It depends on how far — how infested the tree is currently, and then how effective we are with slowing that rate of decline so that we can take those out at a later time. So for 2015, we’re identifying trees that are high priority that we want to remove,” Byrd said.
Byrd and his team track the rate of decline through a tree inventory they update each year.
People may notice areas where trees have been removed, but not replaced. Byrd said that’s because some areas, like The Fraze, were heavily wooded areas.
“There were a lot of trees that were close together. So with our replacement program, you know, we’re going to make sure that the tree that gets planted is going to have the room to grow to maturity and those kinds of things,” he said.
Five Rivers MetroParks is participating in an Ohio State University study that aims to help repopulate the ash trees. The parks system has lost hundreds of trees.
Metro Parks is treating 600 trees as part of the study, said Mary Klunk, conservation manager at Five Rivers MetroParks.
“We’re hoping that (emerald ash borer) kind of moves through the Dayton area like a wildfire, you know, so it’s kind of eating all of the ash trees in its way, and then as it moves through the Dayton area, and there are no more ash, we’re hoping that the population of the emerald ash borer crashes,” Klunk explained. “We’re hoping these few ash trees might be able to repopulate the species someday if there’s something found that can, you know, kill the emerald ash borer in the future.”
Kettering and Metro Parks plan to remove infected ash trees at the end of fall or early winter.
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