[rindalir]

In most forests in the New England and New York State areas that I am familiar with, it's actually nearly impossible to find healthy beech trees, and has been for decades. Beech bark disease kills mature trees over a period of years, and what's left is either smaller trees with significant scarring or thickets of sprouts (which we used to call "beech hell" since they are super annoying to traverse when doing field work). There are some beech bark disease resistant individuals and populations, as well as some isolated patches of forest where there are healthy beeches (and they are... magnificent). I haven't really kept up with the literature on beech leaf disease, but it leaves me wondering if this will potentially fully remove the unhealthy beeches. It would be interesting, in the long-term (is there a long term anymore?), if there are doubly-resistant individuals and if someday they may once again make beech a major forest component.

It's hard to watch beloved tree species disappear. It's very hard. I love these forests so much. But something I have seen time and time again -- is that life is resilient, and it's not like a barren wasteland takes over (at least here). I try to think what amazing solutions life will cook up next.

My background: I studied beech bark disease in Eastern NA forests back in the early 2000s, mostly working on modeling populations and the evolution of resistance.

[foobarian]

Given your background I just wanted to mention I am very impressed by what this area of study was able to accomplish for similar issues in our forests. There was a heartbreaking few years when winter moths were destroying maples all over New England and as I understand it a mitigation developed at the UMass agricultural extension lead to them mostly vanishing.

[biorach]

Do you know if either of these diseases affect European Beech?

[rindalir]

Yeah, beech bark disease was actually introduced from Europe, to Halifax in the late 1800's. (well, i should say, the insect part was. The mechanism is that the scale insect creates an opening for the native-to-North America fungi in the Nectria genus to infect the bark). So the disease has been around in Europe (with local Nectria infecting) for much longer and my understanding was that European beech has better defenses and was more resistant, thought not entirely unaffected.

Not super up on the leaf disease, but it does appear that European beech can be as well.

[wirrbel]

In Europe we have problems with the bark beetle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_beetle) which can devastate spruce-monoculture forests.