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Back to Nature & What a Mess - from today's New York Times
An excellent example human's unexpected consequences on the landscape. Here, Anne Raver's struggles to contain the invasive tree - black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) on the family farm. Anne, I feel your pain. However, I wish she had discussed & compare the ecological roles of native early successional trees & exotic invasives - they are quite different. When the latter dominates an area, it is not succession, nor is it competition or evolution - it is an invasion. All our open space, even so called "pristine" landscapes, need to be nudged along. We are now in the sad position of having to manage lands just to enable processes that should occur normally on their own.
More about black locusts
Sundrops (Oenothera fruticosa ssp. glauca) a native plant and a lovely garden addition.
Raindrops on roses and whispers on kittens...
"The treetops of Central Park in New York City are being used by Western smoke jumpers. The folks whose regular job is to parachute into wildfires are propelling themselves into maples and elms in an attempt to stop the killer Asian longhorned beetle"...so reads the copy on the story of ALB in Central Park. Great coverage, but such drama...Federal firefighters from the west climbing trees...too bad they can't see their way clear to talking more about 1) how people every day contribute to exotic invasives destroying our natural areas and 2) what they can do about it.
Anyway, here's the story
Cornell University reports that one of its entomologists discovered a single specimen of Sirex noctilio Fabricius, an Old World woodwasp, raises red flags across the nation because the invasive insect species has devastated up to 80 percent of pine trees in areas of New Zealand, Australia, South America and South Africa. If established in the United States, it would threaten pines coast-to-coast, particularly in the pine-dense states in the Southeast. One target would be loblolly pines in Georgia.
Finding one bug in a trap is no small matter. Where there's one, there's likely to be more, says E. Richard Hoebeke, a Cornell senior extension associate in entomology. "Whenever you find an insect in a trap, it probably is established."
Learn more about S. noctilio
