Okay we have some people joining us now so we’ll get started welcome everybody to part one of force and bases where we’ll get to hear about a few different past threatening force in Canada I’ll actually be subing in as moderator for this Force inv basis session so you’ll
See a little more of me today just a few housekeeping notes there will be time for questions after each presentation so if you have questions at any time please add them to the Q&A box and I’ll read them out loud for our speakers at the end of their talk with that let’s hop
Right in with our first Speaker I’m excited to introduce quen and Gard from Natural Resources Canada to talk about cyrex and octillo you can share your screen and get started whenever you’re ready uh here we go and Quinton if you just want to put it in the other perfect it looks great all
Right all right um hello everyone my name is Quintin ginar and I just arrived in s Marie to start a new uh position as a research scientist and um I specialized in Visual and chemical Ecology of insects so basically what they can see and uh what they can smell I guess
Um the the a goal is to mostly work on past insect and to lure them into trap so if you think about it it’s uh a lot like today I guess some of you are going to be lucky to uh have a great night outside uh for Valentine’s Day and uh
Basically you are going to try to catch the heart of your partner uh using the exact same trick I’m trying to understand an insect to catch them so basically you want to look good have a nice outfit to be as attractive as possible which usually uh involves some colors so
Insect use that too but it doesn’t mean that you it’s not because you like for example a red outfit on your partner that you want your full house to be red it would be a little bit aggressive so there is some study to understand there
Uh why is that so same way you want to use a little bit of perfume for tonight because it smell nice uh but we all know that too much perfume is quite deterrent so understanding all this uh tradeoff the setup is also important you can be
Well dressed and smell good but if you take your partner to McDonald tonight I’m not sure she he or she will even get into the restaurant um so we have to think about all of the thing when we put trap for insect pest uh in the forest or
In crops so I wanted to talk to you a little bit today about the vision of insect because it’s a topic that not a lot of people have heard about and I thought I’d start to um talk about it a little bit more because very very little
Is known so here you see a graph of basically uh visual acity in in animals so us as human we sit on the top there uh we are basically the the best at that we can see very far we can see very small detail and we are only out
Competed by some bird of prey not all of them but all of the rest of the animal are below us so to give you a comparison Point um see that scale is in logarithmic uh scale here and it’s in what is called cycle per degree so it’s
Kind of related to that vision test we have uh at the doctor where uh a normal human usually see just above that red line at 30 cycle per degree when you are when you have a good eye you see as little as 60 Cycle per degree so that’s
Where we are here in that scale if you can’t even see that first letter which sit at three cycle per degree so somewhere here you are what we call legally blind and that’s more or less how you see the word so then you need correct uh
Glasses uh to try to make it a bit uh better so most of the animal don’t see as well as us here’s another example is a picture of a flower at 1 meter 20 cm one meter of a flower if you are a human and that’s the same if you are a
Butterfly or a bee here again with that spider so I couldn’t find the human equivalent so you’ll have to think that you are a pigeon for that talk uh sorry for that um but just to compare with dragonflies that have the best eyes in insect Kingdom can of any bar see anything
So you see that visual acity is uh not that great and in addition don’t take those picture uh take them with a little dose of salt because here you can see the color like we perceive them but I want to go to a a space where insect
Don’t see the same color as and that’s what I want to try to show you today so here at the bottom you have a human eye and that’s a insect eye but they work exactly the same the light gets in they hit the photo receptor cell
At the back of our eye or through the sdia in insect and we have special cell called photo receptor that have the exact same protein that absorb light so basically it’s that protein is called an opsin and in the middle of that topsin you have that Chromo 4 here that molecule that is
Bended and when it absorb the light of the right wavelength so light is a photon that move up and down at a different frequency if it’s very fast it has a lot of energy and it’s in the spectrum of the ultraviolet UV for example if it’s slower it goes towards the
Red and when this chromophor absorb wavelength of right color it change from a bended position to straight position because it’s surrounded by the Topsy and it’s leading to theorization so if you take the that molecule by itself it absorb light that we can’t see the fact that we can see
Different color it’s because um human are mostly Tre chromatic mean they have three photo receptor so three Gene to code for three different opsin a red one a green one and a blue one RGB red green blue and that is going to shift the different color we can see
And it’s a combined information of the three opsin that make us see those different colors uh just to highlight how important it is so Tre chromatic human most of us have the three obsene and we can see all those color blue red yellow white green if you like an obsene so
Commonly it’s you like the red or the green one uh it’s going to be much more difficult to see the difference between red and green for example and yellow if you like the blue one uh usually you struggle to see the difference between yellow and green so I’m saying likeing
Uh just to save time but there is very different uh uh category or way of being what is called color blind when you miss an obsene you can have a malfunction one Etc but that is basically how we came out with this uh color blind test where
If you can see a five then you have a normal color vision if you see a two you might be red or green uh opsin deficiency uh here don’t worry there’s nothing to to see it was just to catch your attention because I’m going to talk about my results
Now and here is for a philogenetic tree of opsins in insects so I took all the visual obsene Gene I could find in all the insect I couldn’t and uh so it was well known that they clayed regarding the color they absorb so we have a clay for all the opsin that
Absorb uh blue wavelength ultraviolet wavelength and green so both that red and and uh green color are what is called the green opsin what we did don’t know is that when I did that tree I found that all those opsin here that are highlighted in red
They also have a copy here that is in green but the other way around is is not true and when I looked at studies that did a bit of transcriptomic and looked at where the subin were expressed uh all the one with a star were expressed in the OC of an insect
So insect have the compound eyes that are their main eye like us but on top on in between these two eyes they have uh between zero and three ois uh which are called Simple eyes and we don’t know much about the role of those eyes so we know they have a role
In uh how the way insect fly they have a role in avoiding Predator but then now we found that we do have some opsin that are only expressed in those three eyes and are not in the compound eye sorry so that was um a ni Discovery because this
Especially this U long wavelength Subs are study a lot for philogen and species reconstruction so oh sorry what I did after that I thought okay let me put that all in context u in the evolution of insect so I did a philogenetic tree of insect with all the insect I
Had and um class them by order and family so I just want to show you that here family that highlighted in red they have three osel and the one that are in white they have uh between zero and two aity and I’ve put the number of opsin I
Found from each of these categories here and I did that for all the insect and what we can see is that we have a strong correlation between having three o and having that Oben that fall in that red color so that added a lot to that hypothesis that this opsin that fall in
That clay are o specific because they’re only found in the uh we also found that those opsin that are in highlighted in green here present in every insect as much as the one that absorb UV which is important for theogenic reconstruction because if you start to mix obene both from the red
And the green um clay then you’re going to bias your philogenetic reconstruction um moving into my next slide so I did work on a species of insect called CX notio that is has been introduced in Canada not long ago uh but was introduced in South Africa I did my PhD
Uh way before that and we wanted to study the chemical and visual Ecology of the WASP so I took that same tree but I just did it for hopa so I just took here the amop you can see they all have a copy of every opsin
Basically and I was lucky enough to have the Genome of that W was s noo and I dig into the genome look for those genes and put them in my philogenetic tree and I saw I found three gen one corresponding to uh that green opine one for the osel specific one and one
For the U uv1 but none for uh the blue obsene so I thought okay maybe it’s h The genome reconstruction was not that great and uh I have to dig a little bit more you know lot of problem can happen with the assembly so I looked at um a different
Insect like B ant and a Cy related species to SX for that blue opsin and U it happened to be always in the same spot in a genome with the same gene that surround it so I was looking for those Gene that surround that blue
Upin in SX and looked in the middle and still couldn’t find that U blue opsin and in addition to that I managed to do some uh physiological measurement where I basically put electrod in the eye of the insect and you flash different color it’s called a electroretinogram and you can see uh
What color are being absorbed by the eyes of the insect and I found that we have an nice Spectrum for a green obsene and one nice one for an obsene absorbing in the UV but nothing for some photo receptor that absorb in the blue so it’s always very difficult to
Prove something is not here but uh here I’ve tried to pile up a lot of evidence to see that it there is good chance that it’s not here or if it’s here it’s expressed in very very detail quantities and that was the first for menop Tera uh so we found that SX was
The first one to miss the blue upsin and the corresponding photo receptor which write some question um why is that uh so is it because the adult is not feeding so the ology of the insect is that the female lay their eggs in pine trees and that way it’s a p it’s killing
A lot of pine trees and the lvi eat the wood inside and damage the tree they stay there for a year or two and then they come out of the tree and look for a mate so is it because uh the lari doesn’t see the light um one of the
Common hypothesis in insect is to say that blue opsin is often linked to a nocturnal can it be that but what I’m more interested in is it is it because it’s onx noo or is it other species that are Clos related in Sy feta or is it because
It’s a forestry insect so most of the work that has been done on insect have been done on pollinator but when you look at Forest environment it’s very different it’s way less colorful there is less light so it wouldn’t surprise me that the visual Ecology of this insect are is a bit
Different and the way they evolve um their way through color perception and contrast Etc is different and very little has been done uh maybe just a handful of publication even less so I want to dig that a little bit more and study a bit more color vision in
Insect so I’m building that machine to study color insect at the moment in a lab where we can do that uh and I’m hoping I can come next year with uh few more exciting results on color vision in insect in Forest insect of Canada and on that I’d like to acknowledge um the
People that organized uh in P Center Forum today uh my supervisor Jeremy Alison who helped me a lot uh for that study and uh those two fellows uh from Germany that uh teach me to do with a elector inogram in insect and thank you for your attention thank you so much Quinton that
Was really wonderful I think color vision is so cool it’s really fascinating to think about what other species can see compared to us um we don’t have any questions coming in yet but if there is anything um please pop it in the Q&A box we’ll also be putting
Questions information um in the chat so you can reach out to him directly if you think of anything later um Quinton is this data published where can people go to read more about your uh research yeah I published uh one article about all the opsin the philogen of the opsin in
Insect in general and I also published my work on SX notio so what color the fact that it’s missing the blue obsin and photo receptor it’s all open access beautiful and there is if you are interested in more there is some very good review that I can also send
Uh beautiful thank you so much that’s so awesome to know okay well we’ll move on for now but um if you have any questions like we said his emails in the chat so thank you so much for joining us that was a really great presentation thank you very much yeah I’m happy to
Introduce our second speaker Owen Clarkin from Ottawa field naturalist Club who’ll be talking about Elm zigzag Sly so thanks so much for joining us today Owen I’ll pass it over to you thanks so much I’ll uh start sharing screen in my face as well one second Here hopefully that’s reasonably visible yep it looks great thank you awesome all right uh thanks everyone for the invite to um come speak I’m uh thrilled to be here and can’t wait to tell you about Elm zag softly uh so on the left here in
Two photos on the left you’ve got uh a typical feeding trace of the elm zigzag softly this insect only as far as we know eats the leaves of Elms and leaves a highly distinctive uh Trace as you can see a feeding track here uh can you see
My my cursor as well hopefully you can yep we can see that perfect thank you and on the right photo here you’ve got a fairly large Lara um they’re a little green softfly Lar looks kind of casually like a caterpillar but they’re a softly of course uh their eye has a uh
Vertical line kind of a streak across it and then the front legs have kind of like a t shape that’s black to try to identify it if you’re seeing it in the field because sometimes it’s actually eaten the whole Leaf already in fact this yellow stripe here at the bottom is
A fully consumed leaf on an Elm so sometimes you don’t really see the nice zigzag because the leaf is already mostly gone so what are elms well uh we have three native species Rock Elm on the left here American elm or sometimes called White Elm in Canada in the middle
And on the right slippery elm uh these are three uh important tree species for eastern North America uh all the major textbooks uh especially in historical times before Dutch disease became a major issue covered them as important species on par with you know hickories Elm uh Maples uh Oaks you know just like
Very important I find uh in the 21st century in probably in the latter half of the 20th century they started getting forgotten a little bit because I guess the uh Dutch disease had already decreased their economic value and that sort of thing but ecologically very important uh and economically very
Important when they’re present in abundance if you want to see more about Elms I actually gave a talk uh in Autumn 2023 to the Ontario woodlot Association this talk is available on YouTube if you want to learn more and you have an hour to spare uh so what is Elm zigzag soft yeah
So it’s an Asian insect that was first detected in Europe in 2003 around 20 years ago um the larvae feed on elm leaves exclusively they sometimes uh cause uh major trouble in Europe as an invasive species causing you know full tree defoliation and dieback and in
Recent year and a bit it’s been noticed to cause problems in North America as we’ll discuss a little bit from the ENT perspective here uh the zigzag feeding track starting at the edge of the elm leaves uniquely point to Elm zigzag softlight presence the track somewhat res resemble a silhouette of fusili
Pasta so if you just want to think like what am I looking for that first photo I showed is a good textbook example and just imagine you’re seeing fil pasta kind of a cut out of it or something out of cardboard paper it looks sort of like that uh very
Distinctive uh so El like softly was detected uh Southwest of Montreal in 2020 and there’s a paper published in 2022 about this this was actually noticed via citizen science and the platform I naturalist and then professional scientists uh kind of figured out what the problem was and
Published this nice paper about it uh a figure from that paper shows Montreal as being more or less an epicenter of what was known in 2020 mainly because I think the first record was uh at St Martin a little bit south of Montreal and then a few other records were noticed I think
With some intentional searching this record at Voyager Provincial Park in Ontario was by me and by accident I just photographed some Elms and uh uh one of the authors noticed uh a feeding track of ezs in my photo uh the government of Canada website talks about Elm zigzag softly I wanted
To show actually just a mature insect there’s like an adult insect there so it’s a softly black body with white legs and the species name luopa refers to the fact that it has white legs I’m also going to note just uh out of kind of curiosity It’s Kind of a Funny the
Website’s a bit out of date now is last updated in 2020 uh September 10th and actually the first record of me finding it at Voyer Park was taken a few days later to the photo so need to update that I think a little bit uh so indeed
In 2020 I was doing a survey at Voyager Provincial Park for red Spruce of all things but I photograph kind of just incidentals as I’m walking by I think I remember seeing this weird pattern in this American elm leaf and just sort of posted the elm itself to I naturalist as
A record and Spencer K monton one of the authors of that paper but the Montreal discovery of elm Zig sofly noticed my in naturalist record and contacted me saying he thought that that was an Elm zigzag soft life feeding track which led to significant work in 20 starting in
2021 to see what’s going on uh led by the autof fil naturalist club with me as the lead investigator and indeed we started looking uh at Voyager Park and found it but then also we went towards the St Lawrence River for some other projects and thought oh maybe we should look for
It there too because who knows the first Elm I looked at at voer uh at Cooper March Conservation area which is near Cornwall had uh this feeding track with active larae eating away so immediately became obvious that this is uh indeed pretty widespread in uh eastern Ontario
50 km south of Voyager on the first Elm that we looked at uh so in July 2021 we started looking a little bit at the extreme Eastern tip of eastern Ontario and just sort of found ezs everywhere just you look somewhere you find it and then uh one of our uh conservation
Committee members of the field natur’s Club Henry Robertson uh noticed it also what we thought at the time a so-called outlier at Elmer Quebec and then uh but it turns out that that may not be an uper from what we kept looking um so just some examples here’s here’s a
Typical feeding track uh that we found during this uh rush to document it in um summer 2021 and then in August 2021 these are the August records on our naturalist uh we just sort of looked everywhere and kept finding it everywhere as we’re going west of course
We’re based out of Ottawa so you have to travel to get to Eastern Ontario and then kind of you can move west to see if you can find it uh back towards home so to speak very easy to find out here in summer 2021 a little bit harder as you
Go west but we’re kind of wondering already like is it west of the 416 is it in the city of Ottawa and um we switched approach to just rapidly uh you know to using car and binoculars from sides of Roads because American Elms and other Elms are sometimes visible from the
Sides of roads and you could very quickly fill in is it present or not present in this part of Ontario VI via roadside surveys and indeed in August 2021 we found it in the city of Ottawa uh feeding tracks including the the title photo there um and uh because my mom
Actually who lives near the border between Russell Township and Ottawa had founded at her property uh the day before so it’s like oh boy this thing really further west than we kind of thought and then in September 2021 we kept looking it’s getting harder to find
But you’re just we we dedicated a lot of our volunteer time to looking for this and you can see all the records here uh found basically everywhere to an apparent Western limit so as you started to get towards the you know kind of uh West Ottawa Carlton Place Smiths Falls
Uh you know Brockville get to again and aqu we we actually looked in this area west of where these records are and couldn’t find it so it’s like okay well harder to find towards the limit and then impossible to find seemingly past that limit uh just give an example of It
Kind of works so here’s a zoom photograph of an elm uh American elm leaf with zigzag clear zigzag softly tracks if you zoom out a bit here’s that in that square there’s that same Leaf this is from a side of the road kind of Park and look and indeed this is the non
Zoomed appearance this is just a kind of a flavor of the kind of work that was going on to find yes no presence essentially for zigzag softly and this was in South Ottawa okay in October 2021 before the leaves actually dropped we kept looking really hard because we wanted to know
Where the Western limit was of this thing and found a few more records in October but not really anything that much more significant and yeah just that’s it okay see you next year kind of thing right 22 uh here’s a summary of the 20202 2021 records all the ones in usan
Ter were done by O and C volunteers um and we basically filled in the entire Eastern peninsula of the province uh we noticed already in 20121 at say Cornwall uh this is causing a little bit of damage already some completely gone leaves and uh bit concerning I remember thinking at the
Time this is not looking great uh but we’ll see what happens in the future um and then uh so regarding the preferred host we noticed that American elm is apparently a preferred host it seemed to have it you know everywhere you’d find the softly you’d find American Elms that
Have feeding tracks of it interestingly our two other species slippery elm uh we only found one record of ezs in 2021 and rock we found Zero Records 2021 2022 until Midsummer 2023 when unfortunately we did find it as well so it seems to prefer American elm over
Slippery elm and rock Elm which may be kind of a good thing because slippery elm and rock Elm may be pretty endangered unofficially uh American elm is actually considered endangered as well but it’s very weedy has a different kind of ecology these two species slippery and rock are more specialist
Kind of uh of you know Limestone environments and more shade tolerant their their biology is a bit different than American elm okay anyways here’s 2022 um you can see we we found it a bit further Northwest but uh we also went to Vermont for a road trip found it on the
First Elm we looked at that was the first state record for Vermont uh where that’s here also in south southern Quebec near Vermont this entire strip here along Lake Ontario except for this one record here was one day just we took a day off work and looked along the
NorthShore of Lake Ontario everywhere all the way to the GTA so uh oh and then here’s a zoomed in of the 2022 records here uh we didn’t we we also founded in this region here but uh we were focusing on west and south uh because it seems
Very apparent that this is moving uh sou uh from the southeast to the Northwest okay then 20123 big trouble so we were in Cornwall for uh a baseball event of all things my son plays baseball and I just happened to go to the local conservation here to have a
Look around I’d been here before 2021 2022 no big problem 2023 full the foliation of American Elms being the regular situation uh this is an American elm that is looks otherwise healthy but it’s just fully defoliated uh very similar to say spongy moth outbreak sort
Of thing just no leaves at all and it immediately is like uh oh and yeah so this was actually a little publication we put on our ofc website about it and then also trees canadensis a web page run by Janet Mason and myself we had an article about it as well uh
And then also when a kind of a dreadful thought occurred if it’s fully defoliating American elm already uh what’s happening now is slippery elm and rock Elm so we’ll see that in a second here here’s uh full defoliation of American elm and some of these little uh
There like little like balls there like right there that’s in here too those are actually the cocoons of the larae so you know really not good um okay so indeed we went back to the cormal area we took a day off work midweek and looked for uh
Slip realm and rock Elm evidence of being used and indeed routinely found on slip realm without major damage and routinely found on Rock Elm without major damage but that was it had been completely rare before that so concerning shall we say we’ve seen similar patterns where maybe some
Invasive species switch host species in a Genus after their preferred host dies back say with ashbo Green Ash versus white ash anyway 2023 uh I was in Toronto for a business trip found it there travier for a baseball tournament found it there and then focused on a
Northwest limit and also the highway 41 Corridor where it was hard to find but was found at Bono Park uh here’s the records to the Northwest in 2023 and other records that are currently on naturalist I’m actually a bit behind on the ones over on the east
Side where we already know it’s very easy to find here’s maybe an important slide showing the progression from 2021 2022 to 2023 I’m going to say this is about 40 kilometers per year from what we can tell we actually each year searched pretty hard past the apparent limit so
For example 2021 in this left pan we went looking at arm prior we went looking past arm prior went looking Carlton Place lanarch couldn’t find it looks really hard to find this one at dun Robin really hard to find these ones at Mississippi Mills and Carlton Place
So okay and there’s AR prior as a point of reference okay 2022 easily found uh kind of in the arm prior uh to fully South kind of area here so like you know past Carlton place and then Southwest of Smith Falls but also looked further Northwest and
Couldn’t find it past here cuz you know you rarely get a chance to track an insect invasion in real time and we figured we might as well grab this opportunity as best we can and get positive records but also areas where you’re looking and you can’t find it as
Negative records and try to build like a pattern of rate of spread rate of damage that sort of thing so in 2023 once we saw the full defoliation at Cornwall we looked really hard uh west of the currently known limits so for example checked up this peninsula up here by
Westmeath couldn’t find it checked at the pemrick area couldn’t find it checked the highway 41 quarter couldn’t find it at all until actually like the last day where we had time to check which was at Bono Park we were sort of just running out of steam can’t find it
Anywhere out here but actually did find it at bonco Park one one tree had been visited by it looks like one insect and one branch head zigzag traces on it so it’s hard to determine how much filled in this whole area is but indeed one
Insect had made it all the way to to uh bonaco Park as well okay so the summary uh Elm zigzag softly is rapidly spreading across Ontario apparently moving from Southwest to Northeast and I’m going to say roughly it appears 40ish kilm per year as a conservative estimate in Europe
There’s some actually there’s some literature suggesting up to 90 kilometers uh per year spread in the European Invasion that started about 20 years ago so it looks like it’s pretty safe to say 40 plus kilometers uh seems quite plausible in 2023 severe damage I.E full defoliation of American Alum
Was observed at Cornwall with near full defoliation in other Eastern Ontario towns near the Quebec border such as Alexandria and hawksbury being almost as bad uh in areas where American elm was fully defoliated Elm Zig ex sofl has now been observed to start using slippery and rock Elms as hosts for their larae
And now there’s feeding tracks fairly easy to find in areas where yeah American elm is defoliated but no major damage yet but we don’t really have any idea what that means for say 2025 2026 so yeah indeed the inventional impact appears quite unclear but the trend at least to me is quite concerning
Right you’ve got rapid spread and sudden onset of severe damage in an area where it appears have gotten a couple of summers ago so research by additional organizations is urgently recommended especially for mitigation approaches I I want to say thanks to a bunch of people I only have limited time
I’m going to thank the three people who helped up the most with this uh Jacob Mueller Janet Mason and my mother Elsa Claren and thank you for tuning in today thank you so much Owen that was a really informative talk a lot of really interesting observations for sure we
Have quite a few questions coming in so we’ll try our best to get through them all in the five minutes that we have here great um the first one is there a temperature when they die off when overwintering uh indeed it seems like there probably is a temperature I don’t
Think it’s fully known what that temperature is uh but it seems safe to say I know we’re having maybe an atypical winter this winter but uh as I recall from reading the original literature a few months back I’m going to say in the minus 20s or you know at
Least right they can they can tolerate an Ottawa winter no problem uh in terms of Northern Ontario maybe you might be getting into uh an average winter being cold enough to slow them down but uh I I don’t think it’s uh Winters aren’t gonna stop this I don’t think yeah Ottawa
Winters get pretty cold so they’re hanging on pretty good then yeah um do you happen to know the percentages of the different Elm types found in the province maybe which ones are more predominant on the landscape yeah so American elm is at least I’d say 95% of
The wild Elms it’s a weedy species very common everybody knows him American elm pretty well slippery and rock Elm uh they’re not as weedy they’re more Specialists of forest environment or like you know calcarius you know alvars or Clays and things like that so they’re they’re shade tolerant a lot of their
Population the underst story were say they’re they’re actually surviving by having leaves that uh keep them alive in the story say the sugar maple or Beach uh kind of survival strategy where they survive under uh deciduous uh Forest as for many years and wait for a canopy Gap
Uh in terms of mature trees it’s i’ say it’s at least 95% American elm and then some percentage that 5% remaining of slippery and rock being maybe two and a half feet or something they’re pretty uncommon already unfortunately awesome yeah thank you um this person here is asking um why are
You using I naturalist rather than Ed maps to report the insect great present I’ve never heard of Ed Maps thanks for bringing it up but I mean I think I naturalist is a default tool and anyone can you know uh upload and also uh see the data uh you know I’ve been working
In conjunction with um you know Canadian forestry services uh the authors of that paper are aware of my work I’ve actually sent samples to them so they can do DNA DNA analyses as well uh I think anatas is great though because uh yeah anyone can do the work this is unfunded work by
Volunteers and to to get this work off the ground you know how do you get the funding in the first place right you kind of have to do something I think to show that this is a problem and then maybe I actually I’d love to hand this off to professional organizations to
Work on the mitigation awesome yeah ey Naturals is definitely a great tool maybe you should check out Ed Maps too that’s another really great one it has all the distribution Maps um yeah it’s it’s a really nice tool too we highly recommend that one great I’ll
Check it out um this person here says they primarily work in the urban environment and have been very familiar and I’m sorry and I’ve seen very familiar feeding patterns on Siberian elm in Hamilton and Burlington um does Elm sfly feed on these species also yeah so I’ve now observed it I think since
Rock Elm was the last one where it wasn’t using as a as a host Siberian elm and American elm seem to be about equally preferred it you can find feeding tracks on both easily in areas where the outbreak is bad also it uses Japanese Elm this is ddana of our
Japonica which has planted a fair bit in recent years so it seems like it uses Elms ubiquitously uh but maybe in varying degrees uh I was hoping Rock Elm would never be used but indeed now we we see it’s on that as well so yep it’s
It’s on all the Elms it looks like oh yeah so unfortunate yeah um this next person here says great info Owen any observations regarding repeat feeding events so do they attack the same trees year after year or do they tend to move on and any guesses how many generations
We have in Ontario yeah that’s a great question um so indeed repeating repeat feeding seems to be the rule so the larae over winter and like Leaf litter and kind of on the ground and I think they just they strong Flyers is kind of the quotation you see in some literature
They will fly around too but they also um they will just come back to the same tree year after year and it’s too it’s since we just saw severe damage late summer 2023 I think it’s way too early to say kind of what what’s going to
Happen next year there but if you go back to the same trees like I showed in those photos I’m sure they’ll have a bunch of zigzag on them I don’t know if they’ll get fully defoliated or not but I guess we’ll see how that goes right sounds good um just from your experience
When do you think is the ideal time to survey for the insect in Southern Ontario uh that’s a great question so I um I was paying attention during spring leaf out this year and I noticed it in like mid to late may already so in areas where it’s um uh known infestation it
Looks like you can find it easily before June and of course once a feeding track is present and the leaf let’s say the leaf doesn’t get completely eaten that feeding track is maybe there for the whole year right so you can start surveying in Spring if you
Want okay awesome that’s so great to know all right for the sake of time I think we’ll move on there are a couple little comments here in the Q&A box if you want to to stick around and check those out maybe respond that would be really great but thank you so much for
Your talk and that was really great and informative really appreciate your time thanks everybody all right so we’re excited to have Alison Craig from bio Forest here as our last speaker of the session who will be talking all about Emerald ashor thanks so much for joining us
Allison thank you Maddie I’m just gonna share my screen here let me know if it comes up yep looks perfect great and can you see the laser pointer as well yep we can see that too awesome okay so good morning thank you so much for having me
Here today uh like Maddie said my name is Allison I work for biof Forest we are part of Laman plant care and I’m happy to talk today about our old friend emerald ash borer share some of our experiences working in the field with this pest uh so the theme of The Talk
Today is essentially where have we been with emerald ashor and where are we going so in terms of where we have been and where things kind of sit today many of you on the call are likely familiar with the fact that EAB has been present in Canada for at least 20 years now
Since it first arrived in Southern Ontario it’s spread pretty much in all directions since that time and uh it’s likely that it will continue to do so in uh new areas wherever ash trees are present municipalities and private land owners have really borne the weight of the responsibility for dealing with this
Pest um and many have chosen to manage this problem with a combination of a couple different tools including insecticide treatments and tree removals these Management Programs have been ongoing for a while and many municipalities in Southern Ontario have been treating for close to or even over a decade at this point and many
Communities in this area uh and soon others are reaching a point where their original EAB management plans that were developed maybe five or 10 years ago are now coming to an end and there’s decisions that have to be made about the future of these treatment programs um we
All know that Municipal budgets are limited the funding is tight and there are many competing priorities for these dollars so there’s an interest in knowing if these treatment programs should continue um and not only that but when they can start to wind down so our research shows uh and this
Is essentially what I’m going to try to demonstrate through the course of this presentation that when you treat your asht trees early so before those signs and symptoms are starting to show you have a very good chance of keeping those trees alive and in good condition for 10
Or more years and with all the factors that can impact trees uh such as pests diseases extreme weather events development construction Etc uh tree removal and replanting is definitely not uncommon in the urban environment and often it’s unavoidable and necessary so because of that it’s important to conserve these healthy mature trees
Wherever we can not only Ash but other species as well like Oak and Elm um wherever it makes sense to conserve them and maintain all the benefits they provide so we’ve been working in Oakville for the past 12 years Oakville is a municipality in Southern Ontario and and they were one of the
Earlier adopters of asht tree insecticide treatments and we’ve been working there in an effort to try to understand how Ash condition is changing over time how these trees are responding to treatments and how EAB is moving on the landscape so with all the information that we’ve collected over
These years we are now wanting to try to use it to answer some of these questions that are popping up so specifically is it still worth treating what investments have been made so far what will those trees look like how will they contri contribute to the Urban forest and
Continue to contribute to the urban Forest um and how does that compare to the cost of treatments and the second question when can treatments wind down so obviously we don’t want to just keep treating indefinitely Or stay on this type of treatment treadmill so it’s important to use an integrated past management
Approach here we want to be adaptive and we want to be responsible with our insecticide use um and we would like to know when treatments are no longer warranted or Justified so to give you some context for the somewhat unique situation in Oakville these are a few key points I just want
You to keep in mind before we dive into the results of our of our monitoring efforts so in Oakville back in 2011 Town Council set a very ambitious Target to conserve 75% of its treatable Ash canopy treatments started earlier than that in 2008 kind of experimentally um and this was before we
Really knew what we know today uh many of those initial treatments and the trees that were included in that treatment program back in the day were already exhibiting signs and symptoms and they some of them were even in further stages of decline so keep that
In mind um as of 2023 last year we have 2,430 ash trees remaining from the original number of 5,449 and right now the replacement value uh replacement value is a common method that’s used to Value trees so how much would it cost if you had to replace
All of the ash trees in the same size and the same condition the replacement value of oil’s treated asht tree canopy is almost $8.7 million and we used it tree to make that calculation we also calculated the total cost for the past 16 years of treatments
Uh that includes the labor and the cost of the product and that cost came to $5 million so just a couple things to keep in mind as we move through this information here so our monitoring activities since 2012 we’ve been visiting a random selection of treated and untreated trees
Along streets and in parks in Oakville we’ve been evaluating their condition using a 15o scale that we developed where one is a healthy tree and 15 is a dead tree and we rate each tree on all the usual signs and symptoms so canopy dieback B cracks woodpecker damage
Things like this and as you can see in this graph the average condition rating of all treated trees remaining in the study so treated trees are the green bars here all the treated trees remaining in the study the average condition rating is about four and that’s a good condition all of the
Untreated trees which are the gray bars uh they were either dead or removed by 2017 here both groups the treated and untreated trees they started out in 2012 around the same condition rating between 3 to four but the untreated group obviously declined much quicker than the treated
Group we also worked on developing these population delimitation maps uh using data from a combination of Branch sampling and green prism traps to outline essentially where EAB was present in higher populations or lower even undetected populations across the town and we progressed to this map every
Couple of years until the whole town was almost covered in this extreme population category so we used this delimitation map from 2009 to kind of dig deeper into the ash condition data and this graph shows the condition rating of only the treated trees so you’ll see that in
Areas where EAB was not detected um or was at low levels of detection in 2009 that’s the yellow and the light pink bars on the graph those condition ratings started around 2 to three so we would consider those to be an excellent condition and those conditions have fluctuated somewhat over
The years but they remain fairly steady around 3 to four and we compare this to the trees located in the areas of moderate or high population so the darker pink or the red bars on the graph and those trees remaining in the study have an average condition rating of
Around six and that’s at the point when we would really start to see uh signs and symptoms being noticeable I just wanted to pull out a few trees from the study to give you kind of a visual representation of what these results are showing so this particular tree was located in the low
Population Zone it was in excellent condition had a condition rating of one around the time that treatments were started and its condition has remained stable over the past 10 years around a two or a three this tree is located in the high Zone from the 2009 map um just down the
Street from uh Ground Zero in Oakville it was one of the few trees in good condition uh when treatments were started in the high zone so had a condition rating of three um and unfortunately its condition has slowly deteriorated over time I’m not sure if you can see too clearly in
The photos but it’s it’s become thinner and there’s significant epicormic shoots popping up so so as of 2023 last year it had a condition rating of eight typically that’s the threshold for poor conditions so unfortunately this one might not make it this tree was also located in that
High Zone just down the street from the previous tree it was in poor condition as you can see in 2013 uh it was in condition R of nine uh and the following year it was almost dead and removed from um from the survey so this is an example of of what I was
Mentioning earlier that trees knowing what we know now this would not have been a suitable candidate for treatment but back in 2011 it was included in this ambitious treatment program um just because they were trying to save as many ash trees as possible so in addition to monitoring
Ash condition we’ve also been keeping our eyes on EAB population so we started using these green prism traps that many of you are probably familiar with we started using them back in 2011 when it was for early detection purposes but we’ve kept using the traps at the same
Plots and the same density across the town and we’ve noticed that they’ve reflected this kind of population Peak and collapse and now it continues to fluctuate year-over-year for the past almost 10 years now so given the patterns that we’ve seen so far we would expect to see fairly low counts in
2024 and these reduced numbers would suggest that the ash trees aren’t under as much pressure as they were during these Peak years and even in these post Peak years um following the collapse but the takeaway from uh I think this data is that EAB is still present on the
Landscape unfortunately one of the major drawbacks of these traps is that they don’t tell us um what density EAB is present at we just know that it’s still out there and we’re kind of following these patterns but we don’t know the density um and we don’t know exactly the
Role of Ash regeneration in natural areas or the role of biocontrol yet clearly um and how those things might be influencing and will continue to influence EAB populations going forward so with all of that information gathered we’re kind of coming back to the numbers and a very important
Disclaimer here I’m not an economist so this is a fairly simple analysis but we’re looking at the total costs so all of the the treatments administered over the past 16 years including the labor and product like I mentioned um comes to 5 million dollar plus the cost of removing and replacing the approximately
3,000 trees that have been removed from the treatment program over the past 16 years and then we add to that we’re assuming two different mortality rates for newly planted Urban trees we took these uh rates from the literature we estimate given all of these numbers that this program has cost between 8.2 and
$8.4 million over the past 16 years but this is likely an overestimation for two important reasons one because many of these trees many of the 3,000 trees that have been removed from the treatment program were removed for reasons other than EAB so unfortunately we don’t have visibility
Into those uh statistics or the reasons for removal but many of these trees I know just from being in the field were removed due to storm damage um that ice storm that came through 10 years ago knocked a lot of them out um Hazard trees so construction activities all of
These things have contributed to removals over the years and the second reason that this is likely an overestimated number um and I’ve mentioned this before that in this particular Community many trees that shouldn’t have been treated were treated and that’s just because it was so early
On in the process we didn’t know now what we we didn’t know then what we know now and even given that this this cost of the program is likely an overestimation it’s still less than the total replacement value of the remaining trees which which we’ve calculated using I tree at $8.7
Million and that 8.7 doesn’t account for all the other benefits that these trees provide such as carbon sequestration we’re getting about $22,000 a year avoided runoff $5,000 a year pollution mitigation health benefits real estate value vales all these other intangible qualities that trees provide um and that
Are really hard to quantify in an economic assessment and then finally as those treated trees are allowed to continue to mature and grow their value will continue to increase over time so the next question about when can we stop treatments this unfortunately is still a work in progress this trap data
That we’re Gathering is showing gradual declines in the population so like I said we would expect to see some lower numbers in 2024 but again we’re using a tool here that was designed for early detection we don’t have anything specifically for population monitoring and we still don’t know what’s the
Threshold at which EAB is no longer damaging we also don’t know the rule of uh Ash regeneration in natural areas like I said and bio control how those will influence population Dynamics so more work needs to be done there and our technical team is working with experts in the field entomologists and Foresters
To try to answer this question so stay tuned for that and then this is wrapping up um for anyone out there where EAB is still an emerging issue and not quite old news yet um the data we’ve collected shows significant benefit you can you can get significant benefit from understanding
EAB pressure an ash condition on the landscape and using that information to prioritize your treatments and removals to give you the best chance of success and minimize your overall cost so when resources are limited treatments should be prioritized in areas with low EAB pressure and good Ash condition and
Removal should be prioritized in areas with um High EAB pressure and poor Ash condition since those trees won’t likely thrive in the long term and then finally treat early we’ve learned this is very important so before signs and symptoms are apparent our research CHS that if you do this you’re
You’re giving those trees the best chance to stay alive and stay in good condition for at least 10 years possibly more we’re going to keep doing this work um so we’ll be able to track this over time and as you’re doing that you’re you’re maximizing the benefits that those trees are providing
So that’s it happy to take questions if there’s time otherwise uh yeah feel free to contact me if you have any further questions thanks so much Alison it’s so much good information really appreciate your time we do have some questions coming in um and they’re related a
Couple of them are related to biocontrol so are there any biocontrol options for controlling EAB has that been done in the Oakville area yes so bio control is underway um that is a federal um initiative and I believe three different species of parasitic Wass have been um released to date and this work
Has been ongoing for some time the problem is that it does take uh a few years possibly even up to a decade for their populations to build up to meaningful levels where their parasitism can be uh effective so I think that’s still underway and um in they’re they’re
Monitoring the um the parasitism rates and the retrieval rates and things like that so that work is being done right sounds good yeah something to look forward to then yes absolutely um this person here does a single trees and treatment work for 10 years no so the uh treas and treatments
Are um B banial so every two years okay awesome good to know um as the decline in EAB detection through the through the prison trap survey possible due to a decreased amount of suitable host so for example most of the trees have either died or have been treated I
Realize that does not explain the year toe variability though that’s what this person says yes yeah that is definitely a possibility um there have been so many Ash that have been removed from the landscape either just by dying or proactive removal so um that could be
Playing a role in the in the declines that we’ve seen over the past couple of years no and last question here what chemicals were used for treatments this um this particular Community was using the product Tre in trees and good to know um there is another question that
Came in I’m gonna completely butcher this name here is a being found at all in other osly species can you look at that chat oh all the ACA yes thank you um I believe that theyve found it in um oh it’s I think it’s called The Fringe
Tree that’s the common name I don’t know the scientific name unfortunately um but The Fringe Tree I think they found it in that species in the more Southern regions of the United States but to my knowledge um not in Canada they haven’t found it in in any other species other than fraxinus which
Is Ash okay thank you um does the chemical treatment impact other species curious if woodpeckers eat treated EAB if they’re harmed it does not so there’s um lots of information and whoever asked that question if they’re curious we’ve got um lots of literature and scientific um studies that have been done over the
Years looking at the effects of Tre and on other organisms in the ashtree environment so I’m happy to provide that literature if they want to reach out to me directly awesome thank you we’ll have this last question before we break here can the year-to-year fluctuation correlate to the biannual treatment schedule
It could and that’s something we’re looking at um the complicating factor is that not all these trees are on exactly the same schedule so they are treating half of the trees one year and then half of the trees the other year but over the years those treatment schedules have been
Um changed slightly FL they’ve shifted so it’s not it’s not a very easy uh analysis to perform but it is something that we’re looking at to try and teas out of the data okay awesome well thank you so much for joining us Allison great presentation lots of great questions we
Really appreciate you joining us thank you so much all right everybody that’s a wrap on part one of forest invasives thanks so much to all of our speakers for such an informative session and I want to say thanks to all of our attendees too for sharing all that helpful information about reporting flat
Platforms in the chat I can see a lot of really great discussions going on there so we’ll head to lunch now and we’ll regroup at 12:30 for a keynote presentation deled by Dr Richard howlet from the US Department of Agriculture so see you all then thank you