[PCA] NEWS: Blight-resistant American Chestnut trees nearing reality
Olivia Kwong
plant at plantconservation.org
Wed Dec 3 10:09:30 CST 2008
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=20212141
Blight-resistant American Chestnut trees nearing reality
12/03/2008
The demise of the American chestnut is one of the great ecological
disasters of our time, according to a chestnut expert in Penn State's
College of Agricultural Sciences,
She envisions a day in the not-so-distant future when the huge trees will
again be growing in American forests.hrough the first-half of the 20th
century, the species (Castanea dentata) - which was by far the dominant
forest tree species in Pennsylvania and the East - was virtually
eliminated from the landscape by an Asiatic blight fungus (Cryphonectria
parasitica) carried on exotic plant materials imported by plant explorers
in the late 1800s.
See the link above for the full article text.
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