So
you can see right here, the chestnuts up there.
There’s…there’re a lot of chestnuts here.
My sophomore year of high school
I took a class called woodworking
and part of the class was learning about the different trees
and my teacher had mentioned American chestnuts
and how they’re so rare and how they're so valuable
and so I had become intrigued after that and started researching them on my own time for a few years
so when I had finally met Glen Rae
I was very prepared and I tried to, you know, impress him with all my knowledge.
The American chestnut tree at one time
approximately 120 years ago
was the dominant hardwood tree in the east
about one out of every four hardwood trees was a chestnut tree.
And then a blight came in.
The blight is a fungus that attacks the native American chestnuts.
It's endemic to Asia, and especially China.
We think it arrived on nursery stock imported in 1904 into New York.
From there it spread fairly rapidly and progressed all the way from
the northern end of the range of the American chestnut to the southern range.
Within 40, 50 years it was functionally extinct.
So it was a great ecological disaster because
the early settlers depended on it so much
it was the ideal tree for making log cabins.
They didn’t need a foundation, they could put it directly on the ground
it was highly rot-resistant.
Every year it produced a good crop so the wildlife could survive off of it
so it was just almost a perfect tree.
The restoration effort involves back cross-breeding
to introduce genes that are resistant from the Chinese tree
and yet still retain the characteristics that make the American chestnut unique.
We purposely infected or inoculated the trees with a weaker strain and then a stronger strain at the bottom
infected were not kill into the trees with a weaker strain
and a stronger string bottom so that when
rains down on the tree the stronger end won’t spread but still the bottom
and the idea is that they're going to get sick, but the ones that have the most resistance will be able to recover.
So in one year's time a lot of these trees are gonna die.
Most of them are gonna die.
And it seems kind of sad, but it's necessary to get the right genes that we want back into the program.
Right here’s a Chinese chestnut, and we put these in here as controls.
See, the leaves are smaller.
It’s a great opportunity for graduate students to get involved with nonprofits like the American Chestnut Foundation.
It gives them exposure to a nationwide effort to preserve a tree that's very iconic to this area.
It's also a great opportunity to have some adventure
and go mapping in areas that are, you know, unique and forested and far away.
And for us
with the lab and our resources, having a team of people who are dedicated to
ground pounding out in the field and ground truthing the sites
where we’re flying over is a real big plus.
And a lot of fun.
When the chestnut foundation came to us this past spring
and asked us to do a survey flight for them, our goal for this past summer was to
basically take GPS points of known chestnut locations throughout
different areas in the state and see if we could photograph them from the air
and find out if our cameras can identify chestnut trees
more easily than just, you know, if someone were walking around through the forest.
This is an image of one of the chestnut locations in Fryeburg.
This is with the infrared camera
and as you can see chestnut flowers that are in bloom
really stand out well compared to the other vegetation surrounding it.
We also
used the true color camera.
We recorded in stereo so that we can make
3-D measurements for the trees too
which is a kind of a neat capability
not just finding their coordinates on the ground
but being able to tell the field crew how tall of a tree it is.
It’s pretty important.
So are our goal for next summer is going to be
using data of suitable chestnut habitat
and then fly those areas
and see if we can find new trees
get their GPS positions so that we can send
a field crew out and investigate from the ground.
There's no better way to have students involved than in outreach projects
because it gives them an opportunity to make
other contacts for future jobs possibility
but also it gives them a chance to see that there’s
things that happen outside the classroom that are important to their surroundings.
So being involved in this chestnut project is great.
Yesterday I was out in the field with a couple of the students
who are actually involved in the project
and they just talk about it all the time. It's like the highlight of their life.
Whoo! We’ve got some viable seeds over here. Yeah.
The young foresters coming out today are going to be working with chestnut trees.
When I was in forestry school we didn't even talk about chestnut trees
It was just sort of given that it's gone, you know, why bother with it.
It's nice to read about in the history
but now we know it's going to work and now we need to get it out.
So this is where the young foresters that, these students coming along now
are going to be
they're going to carry the ball for us in effect.
If you're interested in restoring the culture
and you're interested in restoring the economy
and if you’re interested in restoring balance to nature
when it comes to
you know
supplying all that food that the wildlife were once accustomed to
then that would be an important reason why people of my generation
would want to become involved with the chestnut.
That's why it's relevant.