Race To Save Hardwood Swamps

ANNA MARIE ZORN

Anna Marie Zorn has a background as a science writer and is the communications manager for the National Wildlife Federation’s Great Lakes Regional Center.

The slender, segmented and winged insect body of the emerald ash borer is, objectively, gorgeous.

Light gleams off its back to reflect, as the name suggests, emerald shimmers along with amber, gold and sapphire. At about a half-inch long, it’s no bigger than two small erasers plucked from a pencil and stacked end to end.

But the beautiful sheen and tiny size of the emerald ash borer bely the damage it has inflicted over large swaths of the eastern United States. Making its way west since 2002, the invasive insect has destroyed entire forests and urban landscapes along the way, obliterating hundreds of millions of ash trees.

With the emerald ash borer now in Wisconsin, expert foresters and ecologists are rushing to batten down the hatches in hopes that one particular tree species might not fall entirely victim to the insect’s deadly appetite: the black ash.

If black ash succumbs to the emerald ash borer, with it goes an entire unique and vital ecosystem of the state’s northern hardwood swamps, which prevent flooding, provide habitat for many species and sequester potentially climate-altering amounts of greenhouse gases.

“It’s not a matter of if, it’s when the emerald ash borer moves to northern Wisconsin,” said Christopher Deegan, state plant health director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. “This is the worst insect I’ve ever had to deal with.”

Deegan and many others aren’t taking the attack lying down. Efforts are in place to fight back against the emerald ash borer directly through biocontrol and indirectly through conservation and management of the forested swamps.

If successful, these tools could be used to yield even greater results in other areas of the country where the emerald ash borer has not yet reached. “All eyes are on Wisconsin,” Deegan said.

Wisconsin’s forested swamps are home to myriad biota that thrive in the wet, canopied shade of the northern region.

“Many species, including some rare plants, rely on the forested swamps to survive,” said Colleen Matula, a DNR silviculturist in Ashland. “Some of those swamps are made up entirely of black ash.”

The game plan is to keep these areas forested, and with good reason. If the swamps lose the ash trees, they essentially lose what Matula terms their “water pump.”

Swamps are a specific type of wetland where trees have learned to adapt to constant or near-constant wet conditions. Matula joked that black ash don’t mind “having their feet wet.”

This flexible yet tough tree thrives in the swampy regions of the northern Great Lakes. Arguably, its most important job every year is the uptake of water.

“Each tree, when fully leafed out, pumps 60 liters of water per day during a typical growing season,” Matula said.

The trees soak up the water through their roots with specialized tissue known as xylem and transpire it through their leaves. “It’s amazing what trees can do,” she added.

Black ash represents about 9% of the total tree density in Wisconsin, which translates to amazing amounts of water pumped from Wisconsin's northern swamps. If the emerald ash borer wipes out 99% of the ash trees in the state, as it has in Michigan, there’s no doubt these places will “swamp out,” as Matula termed it.

They’ll turn into marshes, which are shrubbier habitats that shade fewer of the sun’s rays and transpire less water. If this occurs, the water table will rise, invasive plant species will likely take over, and the entire ecosystem of these swamps will be destroyed.

Forestry experts have seen this coming and are doing all they can to stop it. Deegan and his USDA colleague Ellen Natzke, in plant protection and quarantine, work on a biocontrol program that has released parasitic wasps in hopes of controlling the emerald ash borer population.

While this might sound like an ill-conceived Frankenstein plan, these wasps aren’t the arthropods of summer picnic nightmares. Some are no bigger than the head of a pin, and all have been studied extensively before being released.

“They undergo rigorous andlengthy testing for at least five years to determine host specificity,” said Natzke, a plant health safeguarding specialist.

The hope is that once the wasps are released into designated areas, they will find and attack emerald ash borer larvae, either by puncturing a tree’s bark to attack larvae underneath or by laying their eggs inside emerald ash borer eggs. When the wasp egg hatches, its first meal is emerald ash borer.

Some wasps can attack up to 130 emerald ash borers each. “Studies have shown that wasps are killing 20-80% of emerald ash borer in ash trees up to 8 inches in diameter,” Natzke said.

This is good news for ash regeneration, if not great news for mature ash trees, which typically are larger than that.

Because it’s not cost-effective to release these wasps everywhere, there is a rigorous process to determine site eligibility, including showing signs of emerald ash borer. Unfortunately, this means the release efforts often are playing catch-up to infestations.

It’s not actually adult emerald ash borer that do the most damage to ash trees, beyond chewing on a few leaves and creating an exit hole in the ash bark.

“It’s the larva that causes the problem,” said Todd Ernster, superintendent of forestry and landscape operations for the city of Stevens Point. “It hatches and feeds on the plumbing of the tree.”

Yet it takes time to indicate a problem. The female emerald ash borer lays her eggs on top of a tree’s bark, then the larvae hatch and burrow into the tree. They spend a good year or two meandering about, munching unseen tunnels on the tissue under the bark.

Much like that annoying restaurant straw with the all-but-invisible hole that makes it impossible to drink through, these tunnels inhibit nutrient and water uptake for the ash. Over time, the larvae create S-shaped tunnels that eventually girdle the tree or remove the bark around the entire circumference, Ernster said. These visible markers of emerald ash borer presence don’t show up until well after the emerald ash borer is established and the damage is done.

So, while there is hope for wasp release programs, black ash remain likely to be killed off. And that leaves researchers with more questions — especially in the face of impending climate change.

Climate change in northern Wisconsin probably means milder winters as the state gets warmer and wetter. Black ash helps to stymy that change with its ability to sequester carbon. Losing black ash removes that line of defense.

Dwindling canopy in the northern hardwood swamps also impacts the ecology of these areas, which are known to be nutrient-rich, thanks in part to the black ash leaf litter, which is high in nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, the major ingredients in most fertilizers.

In addition, black ash trees are an important resource for animals in the swamps. Deer feed on younger ash trees; birds and mammals nest in older, larger trees; and dead tree snags and logs provide shelter and material for microbial decomposition. Without trees like ash to provide these resources, the entire landscape shifts.

Rather than work to save black ash, however, researchers like Matula and Dustin Bronson, a U.S. Forest Service research plant physiologist based in Rhinelander, are focused on diversification. That means maintaining a tree canopy with whatever species will thrive.

“With climate change happening, we need to experiment with different tree species that will be able to withstand swamp conditions," Matula said.

Work includes understory planting efforts and testing different tree species to see how they’ll fare in the swampy, wet areas of northern Wisconsin. Beyond emerald ash borer, species diversity in the swamps decreases susceptibility to climate change or other unforeseen challenges.

“You really don’t want more than 5% of one type of tree in a given area,” Ernster said. “We didn’t learn our lesson with the Dutch elm, and we overplanted ash trees.”

He’s referring to a fungus that came through in the 1950s and ’60s, wiping out Wisconsin’s American elm population. To this day, American elm have not recovered.

“It does sound a little gloom-anddoom for the black ash,” Matula said. “But, if we can maintain these areas as forests, we’ll protect the hydrology of those swamps and address some of the impacts of climate change.”

Basically, if the swamps can be saved, it’s still a win, even if it means the end of black ash. But Matula acknowledged the need to act fast.

“We cannot replace the canopy faster than emerald ash borer will destroy it,” Matula said.