The ash tree is likely to be wiped out in Europe, according to the largest-ever survey of the species. The trees are being killed off by the fungal disease ash-dieback along with an invasive beetle called the emerald ash borer. According to the research, published in the Journal of Ecology, the British countryside will never look the same again. The paper says that the ash will most likely be "eliminated" in Europe just the way Dutch elm disease largely wiped out the elm in the 1980s. http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35876621 Paper: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2745.12566/full I read "The ash-tree" by M.R. James last night. Strange coincidence. Let's hope Yggdrasil won't die out.
Yeah but "largely" is the key word here. The elm has not in fact gone completely. I have read articles suggesting that such epidemics have occurred throughout history, and that what tends to happen is they impose a selection pressure on the trees that, in time ,creates a new population that is resistant. Of course this can take several hundred years so, to us puny humans, it may look like a virtual extinction when in fact it is not. However I have not read the survey, so I suppose they may address this and have particular reasons not to be so sanguine in the case of the ash.
That has happened, but a key step involved - recolonization of the landscape by a resistant type - now faces unprecedented obstacles. Also, that has apparently failed to happen at times (reproducing American Chestnuts apparently exist only as hybrids and/or planted oases) or happened in such a way as not to "count" from a human perspective (the American elms seem to be evolving resistance, but partly by speeding up their reproductive cycle - becoming a shrub). One factor - and the combination of the borer and the disease illustrates it - is the increase in speed and scale of such knockdown events from human transportation of their agents. Two such knockdown factors spreading naturally are unlikely to arrive within the same generation of ash trees across entire genetically communicating ranges of the species. With human transport as delivery mode, that likelihood is much greater.
I have over 20 Ash tree gone due to the ash borer , but other tree will replace them . I have planted already with pine tree, other tree
Was it not a period in England tree were consumed for fire and building . ? Spain had a problem also by building the Spanish armada by Philip the second ?
