COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Now you can get a free wallet-size ID card for spotting thousand cankers disease, which is a new, deadly walnut tree illness. It’s close to but not in Ohio yet.
And while state officials hope it never gets here, they want to find it quickly if it does. At risk: $1.2 billion -- the estimated value of lumber from Ohio’s black walnuts -- and tons of edible nuts.
By using the new card, “Landowners can help us find infestations early,” said Kathy Smith, forestry program director for Ohio State University Extension.
“Early detection hopefully means that an infestation would be found inhabiting a smaller area and would be easier to eradicate.”
OSU Extension co-produced the card with the Ohio Division of Forestry and Ohio Department...
WOOSTER, Ohio -- Jack pines, which are common in parts of the northern Great Lakes, need fire to thrive.
So does the rare and endangered Kirtland’s warbler, which nests only in burned or otherwise disturbed young jack pine stands in a handful of locations in Michigan, Wisconsin and Ontario -- and nowhere else on Earth.
Both are part of the same “fire-dependent ecosystem,” a type of biological community that needs occasional fires in order to persist.
And both and more should benefit from a new federal project based at Ohio State University in partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Forest Service’s Northern Research Station.
The Lake States Fire Science Consortium, a knowledge exchange network, has been started to connect scientists who...
WOOSTER, Ohio -- Even a garden in the middle of a parking lot can have a problem with rabbits.
“They were coming through part of the gate,” said a rather amazed Joe Kovach, an Ohio State University scientist who has set up a lushly growing and ostensibly fenced-off fruit and vegetable test garden on an old asphalt parking lot in Wooster in northeast Ohio.
“I actually saw one leave (the garden),” Kovach said. “It pushed its way right out. They were using the wire on the gate as a trap door.”
He fixed the hole with some Plexiglass. The rest of the fence, meantime, is working, he said. Deer and woodchucks, too, have lately been spotted around but not inside the garden.
As Kovach talks, a wren sings from a tree nearby. A robin chirps in apparent alarm...
