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Scientists say sudden oak death epidemic is no longer stoppable

288 points by whyenot 11y ago

jagger27 11y ago
Is anyone aware of any pre-industrial epidemics of a similar scale?
- jerf 11y ago
  Yes. The rapid spread of something an ecosystem is not prepared for is not an industrial phenomenon. The number of such occurrences is. But it's also worth pointing out a lot of this is the result of travel or remote trade. Stopping this sort of thing doesn't look anything like "stop burning so many fossil fuels" or "recycle more", it looks like telling humans they aren't allowed to stray more than a few dozenish miles from where they live. It's not really clear how to prevent this. We have mitigation policies in place, yes, but in the biological world 99.9999% enforcement can be as good as 0% enforcement and that's a hard bar. Heck, we can't even contain the spread of human diseases all that effectively, and that is something that you'd think we have every motivation to do.
- acomjean 11y ago
  The American Chestnut. It was pretty much wiped out by a disease that infects its cousin, the Chinese Chestnut, which has defenses against it. "The American chestnut tree reigned over 200 million acres of eastern woodlands from Maine to Florida, and from the Piedmont plateau in the Carolinas west to the Ohio Valley, until succumbing to a lethal fungus infestation, known as the chestnut blight, during the first half of the 20th century. An estimated 4 billion American chestnuts, up to 1/4 of the hardwood tree population, grew within this range." http://www.acf.org/range_close.php http://www.acf.org/range_close.php They're trying to reintroduce blight resistant strains by cross breading with Chinese trees. http://www.acf.org/r_r.php http://www.acf.org/r_r.php
  - spqr0a1 11y ago
    The american chestnut has been successfully genetically engineered with an oxalate oxidase gene for blight resistance. testing and out-crossing with wild-type chestnuts is ongoing. Wider availability should be possible in the next few years. http://www.esf.edu/chestnut/ http://www.esf.edu/chestnut/
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  Smallpox against virtually all non-European populations. I'm trying to think of specific instances of pathogen based flora destruction, and don't know if I could mention many offhand. In California specifically, the replacement of wild bunchgrasses with European annuals (the "Golden Hills" are very much a modern phenomenon) would be one. More generally, though, the motto "forest preceed us, deserts follow" has applied to human settlement for millennia. The Cedars of Lebanon and Pines of Rome aren't just allegorical. The former are where the Egyptians secured their lumber (painfully scarce along the Nile), the latter previously surrounded the Eternal City. I'd be interested to know the history of forests in India, Persia, and China, other great centers of ancient civilisation.
shostack 11y ago
I wonder if they'll find any hope with those trees left unscathed that are deemed "resistant." Also, with something like this, how do they remove the trees without the disease spreading in the process? I know when I go to prune bits of my roses that have black spot or rust, it can spread just by contact in the course of removal which can be damn near impossible to avoid. I can only imagine how that scales at tree size.
- mathattack 11y ago
  I was thinking the same - eventually resistance develops.
  - deleted 11y ago
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  - MikeHolman 11y ago
    Maybe, but we've seen some plant diseases pretty much eradicate the original species without them developing resistance. For example, the Panama disease (despite the massive resources of the banana industry) devastated the Gros Michel, and is now killing off the Cavendish. Another example is phylloxera, which plagued Vitis vinifera (European grape) vines in the 1800s. And to this day, the only solution is to hybridize or graft them with American rootstock.
    - shaftway 11y ago
      But that's because there is zero genetic diversity in the Gros Michel and Cavendish plants. None. They're all clones. You need some form of diversity to develop resistance.
- DanBC 11y ago
  > I wonder if they'll find any hope with those trees left unscathed that are deemed "resistant." Something similar has happened with Ash Die Back in the UK with a resistant tree named Betty. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-36110639 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-36110639 Here's a bit about Ash dieback: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35876621 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35876621
justratsinacoat 11y ago
>while there may once have been a chance to stop the spread of $ARTICLE_TOPIC — around the year $CURRENT_DATE_MINUS_FIFTEEN_YEARS — that opportunity has since passed. Forces didn’t mobilize fast enough or spend enough money FTA, with minor edits; I think we'll see a lot more language like this in the coming ten years. The consequence, which absolutely no one would be against ("what do you mean, there's 90% fewer oak trees?!"), always seems to logically follow the general disinterest in preventing the problem ("what do you mean, the _forestry service_ needs a 800% budget increase?!"). OTOH, it's generally clear what we should have done, in hindsight, but there's all kinds of stuff like this running around. The ever-eastward spread of the Asian long-horned beetle; what ocean acidification is going to do to corals and anything else that uses calcium carbonate to build its shell; etc
- Aelinsaar 11y ago
  I think if we're being honest, we should have been seeing those article for the last ten years.
- ars 11y ago
  > I think we'll see a lot more language like this in the coming ten years. ?? Why? What's special about the coming ten years? FWIW I've always seen this kind of language, it's not in the slightest new. You could go to most any point in history and find similar things. The problem is you can only tell what needs [needed] the money in hindsight. In 2002 did you know we needed the money for this? Did anyone?
  - beatpanda 11y ago
    Climate change is putting stress on ecosystems that causes them to change more rapidly than they have in the past. You could go back in history and find similar things, but you'd be hard pressed to go back in history and find as many things happening at the same time.
    - ars 11y ago
      > Climate change is putting stress on ecosystems that causes them to change more rapidly than they have in the past. Is it? You keep reading this story and that story about how this crop failed, or changed or whatever, and they always blame climate change. Then you check and see - oh yah, that also happened in this year and that year. Climate change is becoming like dark energy - blame absolutely everything you don't understand on it. Climate change is a very slow, very subtle process that is difficult to even see unless you look very closely. It's not responsible for every single thing that happens differently this year compared to last year.
thrownaway2424 11y ago
On the coast we have sudden oak death. In the hills they have pine bark beetles. Bad years for (some) trees.
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
What can be done to deal with the death of trees, then? Mass planting of resistant species?
- Afforess 11y ago
  Nature abhors a monoculture. Forests with 'resistant' strains will end up causing more problems if they are only a few types of trees. Maybe we should do nothing, and let trees that are more capable of surviving fill in the gaps left by the oaks.
  - bdamm 11y ago
    Where I live (Sierra foothills), the Oaks are enjoying the space opened up by the Pine tree die-off thanks to bark beetle. People are paying thousands of dollars to cut down towering pines. I have five enormous oaks and four full-size pines on my 1 acre lot. That adds up to a potential liability of $18,000 or more. Doing nothing does not sound appealing.
- jandrese 11y ago
  This is the natural cycle of things. The dead trees will open up space for competitors to move in until some disease/insect/etc... comes in to clear out the new competitors and open up space for yet another competitor. It's really only a problem if the trees are crop trees and someone's livelihood is at stake (see: Orange Greening). Otherwise it's best (easiest) to just leave the problem alone and accept that something else will take the place of those trees.
jqm 11y ago
The prevention to this type of problem is probably the same measure needed to fix many forestry problems. Regular fires. But now we have homes right up to the forest and no one wants to look at charred land for two decades. So I suppose it's still a no go. The thing about fire though is eventually it probably happens anyway.
- jcoffland 11y ago
  Yes, fires are really important to the health of forests. Suppression of fires is a major part of the problem.
- blakes 11y ago
  It's unfortunate that most the public isn't aware of how important forest fires are. Humans suppressing forest fires cause more damage in the long run. As far as I understand, fires essentially burn up the dead bits on the ground. When it happens naturally, the fires don't hurt the trees. But humans stop areas from burning and the dead bits build up and burn hotter, setting the trees ablaze and then we get these crazy forest fires. We just need to let them burn on their own, it'll sort itself out. I hear this all the time from people I work with, Forestry department at a University.
  - bdamm 11y ago
    Perhaps what we need is to better understand how to make effective fire breaks and better manage planned fires. The reason people fight forest fires is to stop them from burning down homes and businesses, not just out of an anti-fire aesthetic. Letting a fire rage and then saying, oh we'll just stop the fire from burning this gas station, hotel, and town that is here, is damned hard to do. Sure, people built close to forests. People also built close to fault lines, flood plains, tsunami zones, unstable soil, on top of limestone, near industrial areas, in hurricane, tornado, ice storm, or "lake effect" zones, etc. There are precious few places that are devoid of some periodic natural ravaging. We can't just say, ah well, let it all happen and don't do anything about it.
    - 11y ago
Declanomous 11y ago
This makes me wonder what role fire normally plays in the life-cycle of tree pathogens. Does this fungus survive heat well? Can it survive in the soil long enough to spread to a new host (presumably a new Oak tree)? As a second point, this demonstrates the danger presented by monoculture. The industrialization of agriculture horticulture has been unquestionably beneficial for us as a species. However, we do an absolutely terrible job of managing existential risks in horticulture. When we grow crops, we grow millions of acres of the same crop. When we plant trees, we plant thousands of the same trees. City streets in the US used to be lined with Ash trees, as they were inexpensive and fast growing. Now there are areas where almost every tree has been cut down because of the Emerald Ash Borer. I think the blame can be assigned as much to the consumer as it can with the individuals growing the plants. Consumers, (myself included) are extremely picky about what they will eat or buy. Varieties of crops are selected for their looks, and varieties of crops that are not consistently good looking fall by the wayside. I don't think this will cause a famine in the first world in the near future, but the poor genetic diversity of our horticulture is definitely an area of concern.
- ajkjk 11y ago
  The interaction between forest fires and tree pathogens is an area of active research - a friend of mine is studying exactly that in her ecology PhD program. http://ucanr.edu/sites/rizzolab/Research_Projects/Big_Sur_Ecoregion/ http://ucanr.edu/sites/rizzolab/Research_Projects/Big_Sur_Ec...
  - Declanomous 11y ago
    That is really cool, thanks! I've spend a lot of time conducting research and restoring Oak Savannas in the Upper Midwest, and I'd hate to see anything happen to few remaining areas we have left. The Oak Savanna exists because of fire, rather than in spite of it, and it would be really interesting to see if fire did more for oak trees beyond burning competing species. In the course of writing this comment, I checked the Wikipedia page for Oak Savannas to see if it had any interesting insights. I didn't realize that California oaks formed oak savannas as well. Hopefully that means that research in the Midwest and Californian savannas can be shared and used to draw insights into one another. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_savanna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_savanna
djsumdog 11y ago
> The disease is actually related to the pathogen that caused the Irish potato famine in the 1800s I was in Ireland a few months ago. Someone I met in Galway said this famine wasn't really a famine; that there were plenty of crops. The king simply withheld the potato supply, forcing the famine.
- cafard 11y ago
  Other crops continued to do well, and Ireland still exported food; but the peasantry relied on potatoes, and the potatoes rotted.
  - emodendroket 11y ago
    I guess we could call the parent comment half-right, then, since presumably halting exports of food during a famine would have ameliorated it.
- forrestthewoods 11y ago
  No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Potatoes_Production_Great_Famine_en.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Potatoes_Production_Great... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
  - deleted 11y ago
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- deepnet 11y ago
  This is true, it lasted 7 years. 1 million died, 1 million forced to emigrate, 25% of Ireland's population There was a potato blight, potatoes were grown by the Irish folk for sustenance. Many Irish peasants & farmers starved to death on Absentee Estate Farms which were exporting food crops to be sold - worse aid from England was withheld for considerable time. It is a shameful episode in the History between Ireland and England. In those times many viewed the lower classes and other nationalities as somehow less human than themselves.
emodendroket 11y ago
It's disappointing to see serious reporting like this saddled with a clickbait title like "This disease has killed a million trees in California, and scientists say it’s basically unstoppable."
- chc 11y ago
  After reading the article, that seems like a fair summary. What do you feel is wrong with it?
  - Tossrock 11y ago
    Obscuring the subject to force a click. "This disease" instead of "Sudden oak death". The idea is that person will read the scary part, want to find out which particular disease it is, and click through. It's headline SEO 101.
    - chc 11y ago
      The odds aren't great that a given person knows what "sudden oak death" is, so that doesn't seem to add much except an extra expectation on the reader. I'm pretty sure this headline is not far from what it would been as a newspaper headline 30 years ago. It would have just been "Disease" rather than "This disease" since newspaper headlines favor brevity, but using common nouns in headlines for things that aren't super well-known is a pretty established practice (e.g. "Florida man" rather than "Robert Johnson"). I guess basically, it doesn't seem like the name of the disease is really the point of the article.
      - Dylan16807 11y ago
        Yes. You either already know about the disease or you don't. The wording of "disease" vs. "sudden oak death" doesn't change how much I want to click at all. It's not a situation where the title might obscure which disease is causing the problem. There's one problem. And "sudden oak death" is sort of a fake name anyway.
  - emodendroket 11y ago
whyenot 11y ago
Five hundred years ago, Spaniards spread the seeds of european annual grasses as they traveled between missions in California. Within a century or two, a large part of the California landscape had changed. Annual grasses crowded out native perennial grasses, and we got our "golden hills." Nobody knows exactly what California looked like before the Spanish arrived or how many species may have gone extinct, but you can still see echoes of what happened. For example Mount Hamilton Jewelflower, now reduced to a few relict populations on serpentine soil where the annual grasses don't grow so high... SOD is a disturbance of similar magnitude. It won't kill all the oaks. For example it only kills black oaks (coastal live oak, interior live oak, California black oak, ...) but not white oaks (blue oak, valley oak, ...). What it likely will do is over time dramatically change the makeup of the oak woodlands, especially along the coast and in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
- stevecalifornia 11y ago
  Not plant related, but equally fascinating: There used to be a lake bigger than Lake Tahoe in California between Fresno and Bakersfield. It It was the largest fresh water lake west of the Great Lakes (by surface area). It was drained for agriculture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulare_Lake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulare_Lake
  - kingmanaz 11y ago
    For a good read on what happened to Lake Tulare, read "The King of California". The world's largest cotton plantation now sits in the lakebed and holds primary water rights. Pink sheet stock. Ticker BWEL.
    - daodedickinson 11y ago
      required reading on the topic: http://www.amazon.com/California-Indians-Their-Environment-Introduction/dp/0520256905 http://www.amazon.com/California-Indians-Their-Environment-I...
    - ParadigmBlender 11y ago
intrasight 11y ago
They could just as way say: "Scientists say the evolution of the natural landscape is no longer stoppable"
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- Angostura 11y ago
  It's curious that so much 'evolution' is going on at the moment. Interesting how the Great Barrier Reef and the oceans fisheries are currently 'evolving' Rather remiscent of how the Western European population evolved in response to the plague.
  - Consultant32452 11y ago
    That's the fun of natural selection, sometimes you get selected, sometimes you don't.
    - Angostura 10y ago
      Natural selection only works as a driving force of evolution where there is sufficient variety in a population for the reproductively fit individuals to be selected. Where environmental change is so rapid that none of the individuals are fit, you don;t get evolution, you get extinction.
gloriousduke 11y ago
Hawaii island is dealing with a fungal pathogen that impacts the most abundant native tree similarly: http://www2.ctahr.hawaii.edu/forestry/disease/ohia_wilt.html http://www2.ctahr.hawaii.edu/forestry/disease/ohia_wilt.html.
- wahsd 11y ago
  Don't worry, soon humans will have destroyed all habitats. We're working really hard, but we can't get to it all at once.
pfarnsworth 11y ago
I'm sorry but isn't this just Darwinism in play here? You get natural selection, and various species that are selected against become extinct. But it's not like it's going to turn into some sort of desert, the area, after forest fires, will be replaced by another species that is presumably resistant to the fungus, and life moves on.
- arcticfox 11y ago
  It's a rhododendron disease from the Netherlands. You're right, that this is Darwinism in play, but it's due to human influence. So human intervention is no more artificial than the original evolutionary pressure. It just depends whether we value preserving diverse ecosystems, or if we're happy to spread species / diseases around the world and just see what survives. I'm not saying there's a fundamentally "right" answer, but I prefer diverse ecosystems to the point I think it's worth trying to intervene when possible.
- jokr004 11y ago
  I don't think anyone is trying to blame someone for this.. Absolutely this is nature taking its course, but we happen to like oak trees so it might make sense that we would try and protect them.
  - pfarnsworth 11y ago
    But it no longer makes sense, since the scientists have already said that it's unstoppable. So dumping more money into trying to protect them seems like a waste of money, no?
    - ArtDev 11y ago
      Giving up is a very poor plan. Dead trees make wildfires much much worse. California wildfires are terrible as it is.
      - pfarnsworth 11y ago
        Forest fires are a natural part of the cycle. In fact, it's forest fire "prevention" that causes even bigger forest fires than normal. If they simply let fires burn, it would naturally cleanse the forests of brush and dead trees and create much smaller forest fires.
nroach 11y ago
Sadly, this isn't the only fungal pathogen attacking american oaks. Oak Wilt is dealing similar damage across the south and central plains states: http://www.na.fs.fed.us/spfo/pubs/fidls/oakwilt/oakwilt.htm http://www.na.fs.fed.us/spfo/pubs/fidls/oakwilt/oakwilt.htm
adolgert 11y ago
There's a great paper modeling risk of invasion by sudden oak death into California. Computing for science, done right: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/ES10-00192.1/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/ES10-00192.1/full
nradov 11y ago
Besides the fungal pathogen Phytophthora ramorum that kills oak trees, similar funguses are also killing other types of trees. Many avocado orchards in California have been wiped out by Phytophthora cinnamomi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytophthora https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytophthora
ArtDev 11y ago
On an unrelated note, the best comment reply ever: "Why do you assume that the experts missed a plan that some random guy on the Internet came up with in 30 seconds?"
- mjevans 11y ago
  Different areas of specialization or... "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_Law
mdip 11y ago
Years ago all of the oak trees in my area were cut down due to being killed by the Emerald Ash Borer, a beetle. Fines were imposed for exporting fire wood outside of the affected counties (a common thing to do in my state where people take their chopped logs up to their cabins for bonfires) but it did little to keep the bug from spreading further and further. Many of these trees were in large forests, but it's most noticeable in my area due to the sudden change in suburbia from large oak trees planted when the homes were originally built (some a half-century or more ago) now having unusual looking, small maple trees adorning the front of their property. It's sad to see yet another pest attacking those same trees.
- hinkley 11y ago
  Something like this happened at my college, and one of my friends was in the forestry program. He was so pissed because every time trees on campus got a disease, they'd cut them down and replace them all with a single species. So in 50 years when those trees got a disease, they had to cut them all down again. So 50 years from now some maple disease will have your town cutting down all the trees all over again :/
  - mdip 10y ago
    That's a good point and bound to happen. In our area, the township covered the price of the removal of the tree provided you allowed them to take it when they chose to (otherwise you'd have to pay for the removal of a dead tree or get fined for not handling a dead tree on your property). Since the various jurisdictions didn't pay for the replacement trees (but all had ordinances requiring a tree every "x" feet where the property meets the roadway), people were free to purchase any kind of tree they wished. The problem is that Maples were the most inexpensive tree that could be purchased at a reasonable size so nearly everyone planted a variety of Maple. So,... yup ... give it a few years.

288 points by whyenot 11y ago

jagger27 11y ago

Is anyone aware of any pre-industrial epidemics of a similar scale?

jerf 11y ago
Yes. The rapid spread of something an ecosystem is not prepared for is not an industrial phenomenon. The number of such occurrences is. But it's also worth pointing out a lot of this is the result of travel or remote trade. Stopping this sort of thing doesn't look anything like "stop burning so many fossil fuels" or "recycle more", it looks like telling humans they aren't allowed to stray more than a few dozenish miles from where they live. It's not really clear how to prevent this. We have mitigation policies in place, yes, but in the biological world 99.9999% enforcement can be as good as 0% enforcement and that's a hard bar. Heck, we can't even contain the spread of human diseases all that effectively, and that is something that you'd think we have every motivation to do.
acomjean 11y ago
The American Chestnut. It was pretty much wiped out by a disease that infects its cousin, the Chinese Chestnut, which has defenses against it. "The American chestnut tree reigned over 200 million acres of eastern woodlands from Maine to Florida, and from the Piedmont plateau in the Carolinas west to the Ohio Valley, until succumbing to a lethal fungus infestation, known as the chestnut blight, during the first half of the 20th century. An estimated 4 billion American chestnuts, up to 1/4 of the hardwood tree population, grew within this range." http://www.acf.org/range_close.php http://www.acf.org/range_close.php They're trying to reintroduce blight resistant strains by cross breading with Chinese trees. http://www.acf.org/r_r.php http://www.acf.org/r_r.php
- spqr0a1 11y ago
  The american chestnut has been successfully genetically engineered with an oxalate oxidase gene for blight resistance. testing and out-crossing with wild-type chestnuts is ongoing. Wider availability should be possible in the next few years. http://www.esf.edu/chestnut/ http://www.esf.edu/chestnut/
dredmorbius 11y ago
Smallpox against virtually all non-European populations. I'm trying to think of specific instances of pathogen based flora destruction, and don't know if I could mention many offhand. In California specifically, the replacement of wild bunchgrasses with European annuals (the "Golden Hills" are very much a modern phenomenon) would be one. More generally, though, the motto "forest preceed us, deserts follow" has applied to human settlement for millennia. The Cedars of Lebanon and Pines of Rome aren't just allegorical. The former are where the Egyptians secured their lumber (painfully scarce along the Nile), the latter previously surrounded the Eternal City. I'd be interested to know the history of forests in India, Persia, and China, other great centers of ancient civilisation.

shostack 11y ago

I wonder if they'll find any hope with those trees left unscathed that are deemed "resistant." Also, with something like this, how do they remove the trees without the disease spreading in the process? I know when I go to prune bits of my roses that have black spot or rust, it can spread just by contact in the course of removal which can be damn near impossible to avoid. I can only imagine how that scales at tree size.

mathattack 11y ago
I was thinking the same - eventually resistance develops.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- MikeHolman 11y ago
  Maybe, but we've seen some plant diseases pretty much eradicate the original species without them developing resistance. For example, the Panama disease (despite the massive resources of the banana industry) devastated the Gros Michel, and is now killing off the Cavendish. Another example is phylloxera, which plagued Vitis vinifera (European grape) vines in the 1800s. And to this day, the only solution is to hybridize or graft them with American rootstock.
  - shaftway 11y ago
    But that's because there is zero genetic diversity in the Gros Michel and Cavendish plants. None. They're all clones. You need some form of diversity to develop resistance.
DanBC 11y ago
> I wonder if they'll find any hope with those trees left unscathed that are deemed "resistant." Something similar has happened with Ash Die Back in the UK with a resistant tree named Betty. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-36110639 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-36110639 Here's a bit about Ash dieback: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35876621 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35876621

justratsinacoat 11y ago

>while there may once have been a chance to stop the spread of $ARTICLE_TOPIC — around the year $CURRENT_DATE_MINUS_FIFTEEN_YEARS — that opportunity has since passed. Forces didn’t mobilize fast enough or spend enough money FTA, with minor edits; I think we'll see a lot more language like this in the coming ten years. The consequence, which absolutely no one would be against ("what do you mean, there's 90% fewer oak trees?!"), always seems to logically follow the general disinterest in preventing the problem ("what do you mean, the _forestry service_ needs a 800% budget increase?!"). OTOH, it's generally clear what we should have done, in hindsight, but there's all kinds of stuff like this running around. The ever-eastward spread of the Asian long-horned beetle; what ocean acidification is going to do to corals and anything else that uses calcium carbonate to build its shell; etc

Aelinsaar 11y ago
I think if we're being honest, we should have been seeing those article for the last ten years.
ars 11y ago
> I think we'll see a lot more language like this in the coming ten years. ?? Why? What's special about the coming ten years? FWIW I've always seen this kind of language, it's not in the slightest new. You could go to most any point in history and find similar things. The problem is you can only tell what needs [needed] the money in hindsight. In 2002 did you know we needed the money for this? Did anyone?
- beatpanda 11y ago
  Climate change is putting stress on ecosystems that causes them to change more rapidly than they have in the past. You could go back in history and find similar things, but you'd be hard pressed to go back in history and find as many things happening at the same time.
  - ars 11y ago
    > Climate change is putting stress on ecosystems that causes them to change more rapidly than they have in the past. Is it? You keep reading this story and that story about how this crop failed, or changed or whatever, and they always blame climate change. Then you check and see - oh yah, that also happened in this year and that year. Climate change is becoming like dark energy - blame absolutely everything you don't understand on it. Climate change is a very slow, very subtle process that is difficult to even see unless you look very closely. It's not responsible for every single thing that happens differently this year compared to last year.

thrownaway2424 11y ago

On the coast we have sudden oak death. In the hills they have pine bark beetles. Bad years for (some) trees.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago

What can be done to deal with the death of trees, then? Mass planting of resistant species?

Afforess 11y ago
Nature abhors a monoculture. Forests with 'resistant' strains will end up causing more problems if they are only a few types of trees. Maybe we should do nothing, and let trees that are more capable of surviving fill in the gaps left by the oaks.
- bdamm 11y ago
  Where I live (Sierra foothills), the Oaks are enjoying the space opened up by the Pine tree die-off thanks to bark beetle. People are paying thousands of dollars to cut down towering pines. I have five enormous oaks and four full-size pines on my 1 acre lot. That adds up to a potential liability of $18,000 or more. Doing nothing does not sound appealing.
jandrese 11y ago
This is the natural cycle of things. The dead trees will open up space for competitors to move in until some disease/insect/etc... comes in to clear out the new competitors and open up space for yet another competitor. It's really only a problem if the trees are crop trees and someone's livelihood is at stake (see: Orange Greening). Otherwise it's best (easiest) to just leave the problem alone and accept that something else will take the place of those trees.

jqm 11y ago

The prevention to this type of problem is probably the same measure needed to fix many forestry problems. Regular fires. But now we have homes right up to the forest and no one wants to look at charred land for two decades. So I suppose it's still a no go. The thing about fire though is eventually it probably happens anyway.

jcoffland 11y ago
Yes, fires are really important to the health of forests. Suppression of fires is a major part of the problem.
blakes 11y ago
It's unfortunate that most the public isn't aware of how important forest fires are. Humans suppressing forest fires cause more damage in the long run. As far as I understand, fires essentially burn up the dead bits on the ground. When it happens naturally, the fires don't hurt the trees. But humans stop areas from burning and the dead bits build up and burn hotter, setting the trees ablaze and then we get these crazy forest fires. We just need to let them burn on their own, it'll sort itself out. I hear this all the time from people I work with, Forestry department at a University.
- bdamm 11y ago
  Perhaps what we need is to better understand how to make effective fire breaks and better manage planned fires. The reason people fight forest fires is to stop them from burning down homes and businesses, not just out of an anti-fire aesthetic. Letting a fire rage and then saying, oh we'll just stop the fire from burning this gas station, hotel, and town that is here, is damned hard to do. Sure, people built close to forests. People also built close to fault lines, flood plains, tsunami zones, unstable soil, on top of limestone, near industrial areas, in hurricane, tornado, ice storm, or "lake effect" zones, etc. There are precious few places that are devoid of some periodic natural ravaging. We can't just say, ah well, let it all happen and don't do anything about it.
  - 11y ago

Declanomous 11y ago

This makes me wonder what role fire normally plays in the life-cycle of tree pathogens. Does this fungus survive heat well? Can it survive in the soil long enough to spread to a new host (presumably a new Oak tree)? As a second point, this demonstrates the danger presented by monoculture. The industrialization of agriculture horticulture has been unquestionably beneficial for us as a species. However, we do an absolutely terrible job of managing existential risks in horticulture. When we grow crops, we grow millions of acres of the same crop. When we plant trees, we plant thousands of the same trees. City streets in the US used to be lined with Ash trees, as they were inexpensive and fast growing. Now there are areas where almost every tree has been cut down because of the Emerald Ash Borer. I think the blame can be assigned as much to the consumer as it can with the individuals growing the plants. Consumers, (myself included) are extremely picky about what they will eat or buy. Varieties of crops are selected for their looks, and varieties of crops that are not consistently good looking fall by the wayside. I don't think this will cause a famine in the first world in the near future, but the poor genetic diversity of our horticulture is definitely an area of concern.

ajkjk 11y ago
The interaction between forest fires and tree pathogens is an area of active research - a friend of mine is studying exactly that in her ecology PhD program. http://ucanr.edu/sites/rizzolab/Research_Projects/Big_Sur_Ecoregion/ http://ucanr.edu/sites/rizzolab/Research_Projects/Big_Sur_Ec...
- Declanomous 11y ago
  That is really cool, thanks! I've spend a lot of time conducting research and restoring Oak Savannas in the Upper Midwest, and I'd hate to see anything happen to few remaining areas we have left. The Oak Savanna exists because of fire, rather than in spite of it, and it would be really interesting to see if fire did more for oak trees beyond burning competing species. In the course of writing this comment, I checked the Wikipedia page for Oak Savannas to see if it had any interesting insights. I didn't realize that California oaks formed oak savannas as well. Hopefully that means that research in the Midwest and Californian savannas can be shared and used to draw insights into one another. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_savanna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_savanna

djsumdog 11y ago

> The disease is actually related to the pathogen that caused the Irish potato famine in the 1800s I was in Ireland a few months ago. Someone I met in Galway said this famine wasn't really a famine; that there were plenty of crops. The king simply withheld the potato supply, forcing the famine.

cafard 11y ago
Other crops continued to do well, and Ireland still exported food; but the peasantry relied on potatoes, and the potatoes rotted.
- emodendroket 11y ago
  I guess we could call the parent comment half-right, then, since presumably halting exports of food during a famine would have ameliorated it.
forrestthewoods 11y ago
No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Potatoes_Production_Great_Famine_en.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Potatoes_Production_Great... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
- deleted 11y ago
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deepnet 11y ago
This is true, it lasted 7 years. 1 million died, 1 million forced to emigrate, 25% of Ireland's population There was a potato blight, potatoes were grown by the Irish folk for sustenance. Many Irish peasants & farmers starved to death on Absentee Estate Farms which were exporting food crops to be sold - worse aid from England was withheld for considerable time. It is a shameful episode in the History between Ireland and England. In those times many viewed the lower classes and other nationalities as somehow less human than themselves.

emodendroket 11y ago

It's disappointing to see serious reporting like this saddled with a clickbait title like "This disease has killed a million trees in California, and scientists say it’s basically unstoppable."

chc 11y ago
After reading the article, that seems like a fair summary. What do you feel is wrong with it?
- Tossrock 11y ago
  Obscuring the subject to force a click. "This disease" instead of "Sudden oak death". The idea is that person will read the scary part, want to find out which particular disease it is, and click through. It's headline SEO 101.
  - chc 11y ago
    The odds aren't great that a given person knows what "sudden oak death" is, so that doesn't seem to add much except an extra expectation on the reader. I'm pretty sure this headline is not far from what it would been as a newspaper headline 30 years ago. It would have just been "Disease" rather than "This disease" since newspaper headlines favor brevity, but using common nouns in headlines for things that aren't super well-known is a pretty established practice (e.g. "Florida man" rather than "Robert Johnson"). I guess basically, it doesn't seem like the name of the disease is really the point of the article.
    - Dylan16807 11y ago
      Yes. You either already know about the disease or you don't. The wording of "disease" vs. "sudden oak death" doesn't change how much I want to click at all. It's not a situation where the title might obscure which disease is causing the problem. There's one problem. And "sudden oak death" is sort of a fake name anyway.
- emodendroket 11y ago

whyenot 11y ago

Five hundred years ago, Spaniards spread the seeds of european annual grasses as they traveled between missions in California. Within a century or two, a large part of the California landscape had changed. Annual grasses crowded out native perennial grasses, and we got our "golden hills." Nobody knows exactly what California looked like before the Spanish arrived or how many species may have gone extinct, but you can still see echoes of what happened. For example Mount Hamilton Jewelflower, now reduced to a few relict populations on serpentine soil where the annual grasses don't grow so high... SOD is a disturbance of similar magnitude. It won't kill all the oaks. For example it only kills black oaks (coastal live oak, interior live oak, California black oak, ...) but not white oaks (blue oak, valley oak, ...). What it likely will do is over time dramatically change the makeup of the oak woodlands, especially along the coast and in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

stevecalifornia 11y ago
Not plant related, but equally fascinating: There used to be a lake bigger than Lake Tahoe in California between Fresno and Bakersfield. It It was the largest fresh water lake west of the Great Lakes (by surface area). It was drained for agriculture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulare_Lake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulare_Lake
- kingmanaz 11y ago
  For a good read on what happened to Lake Tulare, read "The King of California". The world's largest cotton plantation now sits in the lakebed and holds primary water rights. Pink sheet stock. Ticker BWEL.
  - daodedickinson 11y ago
    required reading on the topic: http://www.amazon.com/California-Indians-Their-Environment-Introduction/dp/0520256905 http://www.amazon.com/California-Indians-Their-Environment-I...
  - ParadigmBlender 11y ago

intrasight 11y ago

They could just as way say: "Scientists say the evolution of the natural landscape is no longer stoppable"

deleted 11y ago
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Angostura 11y ago
It's curious that so much 'evolution' is going on at the moment. Interesting how the Great Barrier Reef and the oceans fisheries are currently 'evolving' Rather remiscent of how the Western European population evolved in response to the plague.
- Consultant32452 11y ago
  That's the fun of natural selection, sometimes you get selected, sometimes you don't.
  - Angostura 10y ago
    Natural selection only works as a driving force of evolution where there is sufficient variety in a population for the reproductively fit individuals to be selected. Where environmental change is so rapid that none of the individuals are fit, you don;t get evolution, you get extinction.

gloriousduke 11y ago

Hawaii island is dealing with a fungal pathogen that impacts the most abundant native tree similarly: http://www2.ctahr.hawaii.edu/forestry/disease/ohia_wilt.html http://www2.ctahr.hawaii.edu/forestry/disease/ohia_wilt.html.

wahsd 11y ago
Don't worry, soon humans will have destroyed all habitats. We're working really hard, but we can't get to it all at once.

pfarnsworth 11y ago

I'm sorry but isn't this just Darwinism in play here? You get natural selection, and various species that are selected against become extinct. But it's not like it's going to turn into some sort of desert, the area, after forest fires, will be replaced by another species that is presumably resistant to the fungus, and life moves on.

arcticfox 11y ago
It's a rhododendron disease from the Netherlands. You're right, that this is Darwinism in play, but it's due to human influence. So human intervention is no more artificial than the original evolutionary pressure. It just depends whether we value preserving diverse ecosystems, or if we're happy to spread species / diseases around the world and just see what survives. I'm not saying there's a fundamentally "right" answer, but I prefer diverse ecosystems to the point I think it's worth trying to intervene when possible.
jokr004 11y ago
I don't think anyone is trying to blame someone for this.. Absolutely this is nature taking its course, but we happen to like oak trees so it might make sense that we would try and protect them.
- pfarnsworth 11y ago
  But it no longer makes sense, since the scientists have already said that it's unstoppable. So dumping more money into trying to protect them seems like a waste of money, no?
  - ArtDev 11y ago
    Giving up is a very poor plan. Dead trees make wildfires much much worse. California wildfires are terrible as it is.
    - pfarnsworth 11y ago
      Forest fires are a natural part of the cycle. In fact, it's forest fire "prevention" that causes even bigger forest fires than normal. If they simply let fires burn, it would naturally cleanse the forests of brush and dead trees and create much smaller forest fires.

nroach 11y ago

Sadly, this isn't the only fungal pathogen attacking american oaks. Oak Wilt is dealing similar damage across the south and central plains states: http://www.na.fs.fed.us/spfo/pubs/fidls/oakwilt/oakwilt.htm http://www.na.fs.fed.us/spfo/pubs/fidls/oakwilt/oakwilt.htm

adolgert 11y ago

There's a great paper modeling risk of invasion by sudden oak death into California. Computing for science, done right: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/ES10-00192.1/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/ES10-00192.1/full

nradov 11y ago

Besides the fungal pathogen Phytophthora ramorum that kills oak trees, similar funguses are also killing other types of trees. Many avocado orchards in California have been wiped out by Phytophthora cinnamomi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytophthora https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytophthora

ArtDev 11y ago

On an unrelated note, the best comment reply ever: "Why do you assume that the experts missed a plan that some random guy on the Internet came up with in 30 seconds?"

mjevans 11y ago
Different areas of specialization or... "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_Law

mdip 11y ago

Years ago all of the oak trees in my area were cut down due to being killed by the Emerald Ash Borer, a beetle. Fines were imposed for exporting fire wood outside of the affected counties (a common thing to do in my state where people take their chopped logs up to their cabins for bonfires) but it did little to keep the bug from spreading further and further. Many of these trees were in large forests, but it's most noticeable in my area due to the sudden change in suburbia from large oak trees planted when the homes were originally built (some a half-century or more ago) now having unusual looking, small maple trees adorning the front of their property. It's sad to see yet another pest attacking those same trees.

hinkley 11y ago
Something like this happened at my college, and one of my friends was in the forestry program. He was so pissed because every time trees on campus got a disease, they'd cut them down and replace them all with a single species. So in 50 years when those trees got a disease, they had to cut them all down again. So 50 years from now some maple disease will have your town cutting down all the trees all over again :/
- mdip 10y ago
  That's a good point and bound to happen. In our area, the township covered the price of the removal of the tree provided you allowed them to take it when they chose to (otherwise you'd have to pay for the removal of a dead tree or get fined for not handling a dead tree on your property). Since the various jurisdictions didn't pay for the replacement trees (but all had ordinances requiring a tree every "x" feet where the property meets the roadway), people were free to purchase any kind of tree they wished. The problem is that Maples were the most inexpensive tree that could be purchased at a reasonable size so nearly everyone planted a variety of Maple. So,... yup ... give it a few years.