Ash trees cut in Mill Creek to stop infestation

By Elise Franco | January 29, 2012 at 12:08a.m.

Youngstown

Mill Creek MetroParks employees are working to alleviate potential danger of hundreds of trees infested by the emerald ash borer beetle.

Ellen Speicher, Metro-Parks assistant horticulture director, said crews began cutting infested ash trees in areas of the park that are highly visited by people, such as parking lots and pavilions, to protect visitors from falling trees.

She said they’ve already cut about 100 trees of all ages and sizes, and over the next three to four years, likely will cut 200 to 300 more that will die due to infestation.

The emerald ash borer is a beetle native to Asia that was discovered several years ago in Michigan. The beetle bores into the tree, and its larvae tunnel into the inner bark, making it unable to transport water and nutrients, Speicher said.

“Last year, they definitely reached this area, and we’ve found multiple infested areas in the park,” she said. “We’ll be faced with hundreds of dying ash trees over the next several years.”

Speicher said once a tree is infested, it will live another three to four more years. It’s for this reason that she said MetroParks crews are taking down doomed trees in highly populated areas.

“There are several thousand ash trees on our grounds, so we won’t take them all,” she said. “We’ve surveyed the park and prioritized the trees that are most hazardous.”

Linda Kostka, MetroParks marketing and development director, said this species of borer can harm only the ash tree and likened the infestation to Dutch elm disease, which was a fungus spread throughout the 20th century to elm trees by beetles that carry the fungus or by a connection of infected tree roots with healthy ones.

“It’s just sad to see a whole species of tree disappear and be wiped out,” Kostka said.

Kostka said public safety is in mind when cutting these ash trees because the infested trees eventually will die and fall.

“These trees will die and could come down in a storm or something,” she said. “We don’t want anybody hurt.”

Speicher said there is a way to treat healthy trees as a preventive measure, but even that isn’t a guarantee.

She said the park chose to treat 10 trees inside the MetroParks that hold significant meaning: two blue ash trees inside Fellows Riverside Gardens, two pumpkin ash trees in the Wildlife Sanctuary, one ash in the sanctuary that’s home to a bald eagle’s nest, one at Ford Nature Center used for educational purposes and several in the Bear’s Den picnic area.

Speicher said crews will replace the removed ash trees with other species.

“We will replant other trees because in a natural area, when trees are removed, it opens the area to attack from invasive plant species,” she said. “We’re constantly planting throughout the year.”

Speicher said the borer is currently in 14 states, including Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Michigan. She said in any given infested area only about 3 percent to 5 percent of ash trees will survive.

“I never expected to live through a tree species’ dying out like this,” she said. “Five percent is low, but I hope even that few survive.”