Within ERI’s MaMA program, you can help the crucial search for lingering ash (potentially EAB-resistant trees offering great hope for ash conservation) in several different ways:
In the project MaMA Lingering Ash Search, you can formally report lingering ash (healthy, untreated native trees in areas experiencing overwhelming ash mortality). These reports enable possible collection of scion (twigs to be grafted onto root stock for propagation), which likely hold the key to ash species conservation. However, these reports can only be submitted for areas where particular mortality thresholds have been reached. If you’re in the Lower Hudson, Catskills or St. Lawrence/Eastern Lake Ontario region of New York, please look at the MaMA action maps for the appropriate region to see if you’re in a lingering ash search zone. More generally, if you’re interested in joining this project, email us at Outreach@MonitoringAsh.org, and we’ll send you alerts notifying you when particular areas become eligible to search for lingering ash. You can then submit reports of lingering ash that you find either opportunistically or through systematic searches in eligible areas.
Detailed instructions for data recording are provided on each of the forms; however, for the general instructions for this project, please make sure to view the required MaMA webinars available here, especially the one on reporting lingering ash.
However, you don’t need to wait for the formal search for lingering ash in your area to begin recording locations of Potential Lingering Ash – healthy ash trees that you find in areas where most of the trees are dead or dying, but where the mortality thresholds have not yet been reached. If you are in an area outside a Lingering Ash Search Zone, but find a healthy ash tree in a location where the nearby ash are all dead or severely declining from EAB, you should: 1) record the location; 2) ask the land manager not to cut down the tree, because it could turn out to be a lingering ash; and 3) email us at Outreach@MonitoringAsh.org to let us know about the tree so we can follow up with you about it once the area is ready to be searched for lingering ash. If, at that point the tree is still healthy, this would mean the tree is a lingering ash, and can provide a crucial role in ash conservation.
Another way you can help the search for lingering ash, is to participate in a MaMA citizen-science project that enables us to determine when mortality thresholds have been reached in particular areas, the MaMA Monitoring Plot Network, which is also on the Anecdata platform. The MaMa Monitoring Plot Network project is a highly rigorous project for which you must typically first attend an ERI training workshop (although you can now access our recorded webinars that present the necessary material). To participate in the MaMA Monitoring Plot Network project, you don’t need to be in a high-mortality area. In fact, you can start reporting data as soon as EAB has reached your area, and can even choose sites for monitoring plots beforehand (which can be an important part of a site’s overall ash/EAB management strategy).