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Originally Posted by Authentic_City
CBC is reporting that the invasive Emerald Ash Borer has been found in Winnipeg. This is an extremely destructive pest that has wiped out native ash trees in eastern Canada and the US. It is potentially worse than the Dutch Elm disease that Winnipeg has been managing fairly successfully for several decades. This is bad news for Winnipeg, but not unexpected. Winnipeg's urban forest is under serious threat.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manito...orer-1.4438061 |
How many of Winnipeg's street trees are ash? In Thunder Bay, every tree planted to replace the elms we lost, and every tree planted before 2005, was ash, so we're fucked.
We're also dealing with the bronze birch borer (which does what EAB does to ash—burrows into the phloem and eats its way out, then eats thousands of leaves as an adult before laying eggs and dying) which has killed about 90% of our urban birch trees, and at the same time, all the Manitoba maple we planted are dying of old age or getting too big to stay upright (which is a problem with that species), so they're being removed, too. There is one a few blocks away from my that's slowly been spreading out and it's only a matter of time before one of the half dozen smaller trees that make up the whole organism falls down and the city removes the entire thing. It's a shame that just as our forest canopy gets mature, almost all of it is dying at the same time regardless of species.
They actually vaccinated about 80% of the ash trees on my street so hopefully it works, some of them lost 80+% of their leaves and were removed. The canopy even on health trees was only about two thirds full, it's incredibly obvious. Like their spread in North America (a contaminated shipment of car parts from China is where they're believed to have come from), they're believed to have come to the city in a shipment of auto parts from Southern Ontario, and they were first detected in an area with several car dealerships.
I'd guess that from that point they've just hitched a ride with Thunder Bayers travelling west. Duluth has had them for about 7 years now. The damage in Southern Ontario has been almost apocalyptic, they had entire forests of ash trees that are now dead.