The city of Vancouver is injecting ashes with a pesticide, since it seems to deal with the Emerald Ashes invasive, a species responsible for millions of deaths from ashes throughout the continent.
The plague, native to the northeast of Asia, including China, Korea, Japan, Mongolia and parts of the Russian East, was first detected in Vancouver last year by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), which caused concerns for thousands of urban trees in the city.
It probably arrived in North America in wooden boxes, pallets or dunnage of goods imported from East Asia in the early 1990s, according to Natural Resource Canada.
First detected near Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario, in 2002, the beetle has spread to more than 30 states and five provinces since then.
Last month, the CFIA said it detected beetle infestations within the city of Surrey, and as a result there are restrictions to move ash products in certain Metro Vancouver communities.
The city of Vancouver said that the ashos represent about five percent of the city’s trees inventory, or around 8,600 trees in total, and losing them would result in a “significant canopy loss.”
A professor at the University of BC says that there are tremendous negative consequences to lose the ashOs before the beetle, and residents must inform any ashes that seems ill to the authorities.
“Eliminate the awnings when the trees are dead, and that tends to have bad consequences,” said Richard Hamelin, the forest conservation chair in UBC.
“The cities get hot … without the shadow, and the air quality decreases. Therefore, there are many bad consequences that the trees die in our cities.”
Many of the trees at Domaine Saint-Paul, a forest on the island of Monjas de Montreal, are being slowly killed by the Esmeralda ash beetle. The local municipality plans to eliminate a large strip of the condemned trees, although a group of citizens is pleading that the process will slow down.
Hamelin said that female emerald ash barers put their eggs in the ashes, and excavation larvae inside the tree and make tunnels, which end up cutting the tree water supply, killing the tree in two or five years.
“This beetle has caused a lot of damage to the east of Canada and eastern North America, where there are large populations of native ash,” he said.
“In British Columbia, we only have a native ashes, and it is Oregon’s ashes … and that is present in the southern part of the province, in the Bajo Fraser Valley,” he added. “So, that’s worrying, of course.”
Without mass death, says City
The CFIA has instituted containment zones in Metro Vancouver to treat the infestation of Esmeraldas ash sweeps, specifically in the endowment lands of the University of BC, Vancouver, Burnaby, New Westminster and Surrey.
“From immediately, the ashes material (such as trunks, branches and wooden fries) and all wood species cannot be moved outside the regulated area without permission from the CFIA,” said the agency in a statement last month.
“If you need to move the ashes material, contact your local CFIA office to request written authorization.”
A spokesman for the Vancouver Park Board told CBC News in a statement that, throughout August, he had been treating the asho along public streets with the injectable Treazin insecticide.
“The insecticide is injected directly into the base of the tree, which is addressed only to insects that feed on the tree,” the spokesman wrote.
“The treatment program is intended to prolong the life of Vancouver ash, but does not guarantee total protection,” they added.
The spokesman said that the neighborhoods with the highest level of beetle detection were the center and Strathcona, specifically near Coopers’ Park and Strathcona Park.
Infestations of emerald ash barers have been identified in some more areas this year, according to the spokesman, even around Sunrise Park in East Vancouver.
In the statement, the spokesman said that it was difficult to make reliable surveillance about how many beetles there were exactly in the city, and that branch sampling was very laboratory and could cause false positives.
“Many ashes, including some that are positive, are still very healthy,” they said.
“We have not seen a massive death of the ash that occur.”
