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What can be done to deal with the death of trees, then? Mass planting of resistant species?
Maybe we should do nothing, and let trees that are more capable of surviving fill in the gaps left by the oaks.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 siz…
The danger of course is forest fires. So long as nothing catches fire, the system can continue to build upon the non-resistant trees.
> 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.
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 absolu…
> 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.
Other crops continued to do well, and Ireland still exported food; but the peasantry relied on potatoes, and the potatoes rotted.
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.
