Scientists save black ash seeds to fend off invasive beetle

On a recent fall day in Hardwick, a group of scientists launched a weight with a rope tether from a human-sized slingshot, off of the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail and up into the canopy of a black ash tree.

From there, one scientist pulled the rope to shake the tree’s limbs. Little seeds fell like rain onto tarps laid out on the forest floor.

“Generally, we’re looking for at least 1,000 seeds from each individual tree,” said crew leader Brooke Fleischman, with Burlington’s Intervale Center.

These foresters are racing against the clock to harvest as many black ash seeds as they can and pass those seeds along to Indigenous nations in the Northeast. The hope is that one of those seeds might be resistant to invasive emerald ash borer, the beetle that is killing ash trees.

It’s a mast year for the imperiled trees, which only produce seeds every four-to-eight years. This, Fleischman says, could be the last opportunity to harvest black ash seeds in Vermont before the emerald ash borer wipes them out in this part of New England.

“There is a lot of concern that we may not have another chance,” Fleischman said.

Breeding resistance

The seeds that fell on those tarps in Hardwick have a long journey ahead of them, one that starts with John Daigle’s lab at the University of Maine in Orono.

Daigle is a forestry professor and a citizen of the Penobscot Nation who grew up making ash baskets with his grandparents. For him, as for many Indigenous people across the Northeast, allowing black ash to disappear is unfathomable.

That’s why Daigle helped found the Ash Protection Collaboration Across Waponahkik, a collaborative push by Indigenous nations in New England and eastern Canada to save seeds and breed trees that can fend off the beetles.

“It is certainly dire,” Daigle said. “But trees are like people. Everyone’s a little bit different, and long term, those differences may offer some hope.”

Daigle and his collaborators — including scientists with the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe in New York and Penobscot basketmakers who first discovered emerald ash borer in Maine — are looking to gather as many seeds as possible to study their genetics, in hopes one might someday hold the key to helping the species survive.

The approach has been fruitful with other trees. Scientists in the Midwest have already found ways to breed green ash that can better resist emerald ash borer, and researchers in Vermont are breeding American elms that can survive the fungus that causes Dutch elm disease.

Some of the Vermont seeds will go to black ash nurseries on Indigenous nations in Maine and New York. Others will go to a seed saving facility in Iowa for long term storage.

A rich history in Vermont

People have been weaving baskets from the tree rings of black ash — or mahlakws, as the trees are called in Abenaki — in Vermont and southern Quebec for thousands of years.

“It’s part of the creation myth,” said Isaak Lachapelle-Gill, an Abenaki land guardian from Odanak. His work involves caring for the land and keeping cultural knowledge like basketmaking alive. “The Wabanaki nations were born from the black ash tree, so the black ash is actually like a family member, or a grandfather, a sister, a brother.”

Lachapelle-Gill’s grandmother is a basketmaker, and so are his great aunts.

Abenaki basketmakers from Odanak and Wôlinak are known for weaving especially intricate and fine black ash baskets. They use almost the entire tree, pounding it to separate out the tree rings, which become the splints weavers use to build their baskets.

Lachapelle-Gill says it’s difficult to fathom a world without these trees his community has stewarded for so long.

“To us, it’s extremely important, and it has been for thousands of years,” he said. “It’s been part of our community, our identity, since time immemorial.”

A message for foresters

As the emerald ash borer spreads, many New England land managers increasingly treat the extinction of ash trees as inevitable and advise landowners to cut down their ash trees for timber or firewood while they’re healthy — or replace them with another tree species.

But for Indigenous nations, waiting for black ash to simply disappear and be replaced isn’t an option — the trees are too important.

“If you cut all of your trees, you’re going to lose that potential to identify a more resistant ash tree,” said Daigle, with the University of Maine.

He says leaving some female black ash trees behind, to see if they or their seeds might be resistant, would greatly help this international effort to save them.

Daigle’s great hope is that one of those resistant trees — maybe one of the 400 or so growing now in a nursery in Odanak — might someday repopulate Northeastern forests so that future children can sit like he did with his grandparents and learn to weave baskets as they have here for millennia.