Here's the latest on how Wisconsin is combatting EAB. I have copied and pasted the text, because to view the link a membership might be required at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel online site. The link has pictures and additional content.
One Step Ahead of the Bugs
Staying one step ahead of the bugs
State searches for ash borer to avoid destructive infestation
By LEE BERGQUIST
lbergquist@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Dec. 14, 2006
Town of Waukesha - With the growl of a chain saw and the scrape of a sharp blade, Wisconsin on Thursday began its first intensive search for infestations of the emerald ash borer.
Inevitably, state officials said, they expect the invasive bug from China to be found in Wisconsin, where some 700 million ash trees make their home.
The kickoff here at Woodfield Park and two locations in Dane and Brown counties is the start of a nearly $1 million project, funded with federal dollars, to cut down nearly 6,000 trees in 30 Wisconsin counties by 2008.
The tree cutting includes all of southeastern Wisconsin. But officials said the ash trees will be cut selectively, and mostly on public property, meaning that the search for the destructive bug will not produce patches of denuded forest.
As it has with its fight to control chronic wasting disease in the wild deer population, Wisconsin appears to be moving with relative aggressiveness to look for the pest.
By comparison, an estimate from the Illinois Department of Agriculture puts the number of trees that have been toppled to search for the bug in Kane County, which first detected the ash borer in June, at about 260 trees. Ash trees also are beginning to be cut in northern Cook County, perhaps 200 trees where a second infestation was found in July. Some tree cutting also is beginning in Chicago, Illinois officials say.
Illinois received more than $6 million in federal funding in July, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department.
The tiny metallic green insect has wreaked havoc where it has turned up. Federal authorities say it is responsible for the death of 20 million ash trees in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana. The areas of infestation in those three states and Ontario now cover more than 40,000 square miles, federal officials report.
For Wisconsin's urban dwellers, state officials estimate that 30% of all street trees are varieties of ash - many of them planted after Dutch elm disease leveled countless neighborhoods of their arching canopies.
If the ash borer is found in Wisconsin, officials will have to decide what to do about it, and that's likely to include cutting down all the ash trees in some areas to limit the spread.
"We are on the front line," said Adrian Barta, coordinator of the emerald ash borer program for the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection. "When it showed up in Illinois, everything became much more critical for us."
Thursday's work was the first step in taking aim at:
• 1,400 ash trees that will be cut down and their bark stripped to look for the bug.
• 4,400 ash trees whose trunks are being etched with foot-high gashes.
In Woodfield Park, two green ash were selected next to a parking lot a few hundred yards from a subdivision.
Crews from the City of Waukesha gashed the bark of one tree. Cutting the gashes, or girdling, is a method of stressing the trees and forcing them to emit chemicals to attract ash borers next spring if they are in the area.
As for the other tree, estimated at 25 years old and almost 30 feet high, it was quickly felled with a chain saw. Then two state employees used a two-handed draw knife and began the laborious process of stripping every inch of bark from the tree.
They were looking for - but did not find - the trademark serpentine tunnels created by the ash borer larvae.
Larry Axlen, an arborist with the City of Waukesha, said larvae wedge themselves into the bark during the warm months and burrow into the first underlayer. As the tree grows, the bug is covered by new wood growth, but by spring it wriggles out and eventually takes flight.
It's the very presence of the ash borer that does the damage, by interrupting the flow of nutrients and water through the tree's vascular system.
Mick Skwarok, an outreach specialist with the state agriculture department, said the crews hope to be done with the cutting and stripping of the 1,400 trees by April or May.
Crews must return to see if ash borers settle in the stressed trees next winter. The trees will be cut down by 2008, he said.
Wisconsin officials are watching activities of states that have been infested with the emerald ash borer.
Michigan, the first state infected, in 2002, has given up trying to control the spread in some areas where the ash borer already has taken a heavy toll. Officials believe the ash borer probably arrived in the Detroit area through wood packing material from Asia.
In Illinois, officials will decide their strategy for Kane County in about a month; for Cook County, a few months later.
Warren Goetsch, bureau chief of environmental programs for the Illinois Department of Agriculture, said Illinois' policy could range from also doing nothing to mounting an aggressive strategy to cut down all ash trees near an outbreak.
"You guys," he said, speaking of his neighbors to the north, "have a little bit of an advantage. You don't have to be looking for it and trying to control it all at the same time."