City planting hardier tree types to replace dying elm, ash By: Aldo Santin Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Tuesday, Mar. 26, 2019

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/03/2019 (2104 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Although the city appears to be fighting a losing battle to save its ailing urban forest, it’s replacing dead and dying elm and ash trees with what it believes are less-vulnerable types.

“We’re planting a wide variety of species (now),” city forester Martha Barwinsky said Tuesday, listing oak, maple, hackberry and crab apple. The city is also planting disease-tolerant American and Japanese elms.

The city is, however, losing trees at more than four times the rate they’re being replaced. And 3,200 more were removed last year than in 2017.

Last summer’s appearance of the cottony ash psyllid — also known as jumping tree lice — is targeting ash trees, along with the ruinous emerald ash borer beetle.

City council allocated $1.3 million in 2018 to fight the emerald ash borer beetle, first detected in November 2017 in the Archwood neighbourhood in St. Boniface. A city-wide monitoring program led to last year’s discovery of a borer beetle in Windsor Park, five kilometres from Archwood.

The destructive insect, believed to have arrived aboard wooden shipping containers from China, has laid waste to ash forests across North America.

Part of the city’s plan included removing and disposing of 800 ash trees. But the arrival of the new pest necessitated the removal of several hundred more, Barwinsky said.

“We had an outbreak (of the cottony ash psyllid) last year in Riverview and River Heights,” she said.

In addition to approximately 1,400 ash, Barwinsky said the city removed more than 9,000 elms in 2018 because of Dutch elm disease, which has ravaged the city’s American elm forest, which provides the thick, green canopy over many older residential streets.

It appears the city was slow to adapt its tree-planting strategy: before Dutch elm disease established itself in Winnipeg in the 1970s, the city planted American elms on boulevards and in parks exclusively. After its arrival, the city planted exclusively ash trees. Together, the elm and ash trees account for 60 per cent of the city’s urban forest in parks, on boulevards and natural areas.

Just 2,500 replacements were planted last year, Barwinsky said. And even though it was an increase of 100 from 2017, the city is falling behind; the five-year replacement ratio ranged from 50 to 60 per cent, but slipped to 44 per cent last year.

“We’re falling behind with the reforestation. In my time (10 years as city forester) we haven’t ever replaced one for one,” she said. “We typically have a two-year turnaround time for replacement planting.”

During the recent 2019 budget public review process, individuals and groups urged councillors to spend more.

“The parks and urban forestry budget has been underfunded for years and status quo is not good enough for the long-term health of the urban forest,” Pam Lucenkiw, a member of the community advocacy group OURS-Winnipeg, told the parks committee.

Lucenkiw cited a drastic 36 per cent cut in funding to protect the urban forest, from $7.1 million to $4.6 million.

Gerry Engel, president of TREES Winnipeg (formerly known as the Coalition to Save The Elms) told members of the executive policy committee that the experience in other cities across North America shows that the city’s ash forest is doomed and urged councillors to divert scarce dollars away from fighting the emerald ash borer and concentrate efforts to preserve elm trees, which he said can be saved with proper methods.

“Our American elm population is the most spectacular population of elms of any other city in North America, quite possibly the world,” Engel said. “The prompt sanitation of diseased trees is critical if we’re to slow down the spread of Dutch elm disease and maintain a healthy population of elms in the future.”

The city normally surveys the tree population during the spring, summer and early fall and removes diseased and dead trees during the winter, but Barwinsky said her department is adopting an urgent removal strategy in which diseased trees will be removed shortly after they are identified.

Barwinsky said the city will continue to combat the Emerald ash borer beetle, concentrating efforts this year in the Windsor Park area.

aldo.santin@freepress.mb.ca