Researchers Identify New Threat to American Chestnut Trees

For lumber companies, the American chestnut was a nearly perfect tree—tall, straight, rot-resistant and easy to split. It also was prolific, sending up new shoots that grew quickly.

In the early 1900s, the species made up a substantial portion of eastern hardwood forests. There were nearly four billion American chestnut trees in the United States, each growing up to 100 feet, with trunks four to seven feet thick. Healthy trees lived for 400 to 600 years, producing several bushels of nuts every year.

Today, however, it can be difficult to find a healthy American chestnut. A fungal pathogen on trees imported from Japan and China wiped the species out in less than 40 years. That loss is considered to be the greatest ecological disaster to ever strike the world's forests.

"The pathogen is native to Chinese and Japanese chestnuts, so the two co-evolved," said Emily Dobry, a Penn State Behrend graduate now in Penn State's plant sciences horticulture master's-degree program. She is doing research work at the University's Lake Erie Regional Grape Research and Extension Center (LERGREC) in North East. "The American chestnut had never been exposed to it before, however, so it had little natural resistance. Think of it as smallpox for trees."

Today, there are fewer than 1,000 American chestnut trees, largely in isolated areas outside of the tree's historical range in the eastern half of the United States, along the Appalachian mountain ridge and throughout New England.

A few can be found at LERGREC, where researchers have been conducting a trial since 2013 with 15 chestnut trees—five each of the American, Chinese, and American-Chinese hybrid species developed by scientists, all planted in one long row.

"The idea was to plant American and Chinese chestnuts side by side with some of the hybrids that have been developed, and to allow them to be challenged with chestnut blight over the years," said Bryan Hed, a plant pathologist at LERGREC.

"Most of the trees have suffered dieback from disease, insects or weather and have had to be cut back and renewed," he said. "The hybrid trees are notable exceptions: Three of them are currently 17 to 21 feet in height."

Trees are renewed using sucker growth from the original rootstock.

"The American chestnut is now designated as 'functionally extinct,'" which means that although the species still technically survives, it cannot reproduce," Dobry said. "The shoots rarely grow large enough to produce nuts, and therefore, future generations."