LOS ANGELES - Researchers say they've discovered the best way to save flowering dogwood trees in Eastern U.S. forests from an invasive fungus: Burn the forests.
cheap ed hardyThe white-flowered tree, Cornus florida, was once prototypical of those forests and has inspired festivals across the East. But in recent years, its numbers have dwindled because of attack by the fungus Discula destructiva, which causes cankers to grow on the tree and its leaves to fall off.
During a previous study, one of the authors had noticed that in three patches of forest that had been ravaged by fire, the trees had fared better.
To follow up on this suspicion, they went into Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which spans Tennessee and North Carolina, and compared patches of forest that had been burned with patches that had been fire-free for the last few decades.
Patches that had been burned twice had four times the number of dogwood stems as those that had been burned only once, and 20 times as many as those that had not been burned at all.
That difference is probably because fungus thrives in damp, shaded habitatsd. When fires burn through an area, they open the forest up to light and air, allowing the dogwood to thrive with less threat of infection.
The findings were published in a recent issue of the journal Forest Ecology and Management.
Ruth Yanai, an ecosystem Tiffany Earrings ecologist at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, said the finding provided hope that tweaking forest-management strategies could help save the tree and the other species that depend on it.
Other articles:
http://www.huanghun.com/plus/view.php?aid=40
http://www.sqrmyy.com/Peggy-Jo-Stewart-Derived-head.html
