July 17, 2013

Bringing back the chestnut tree...

... 2 different approaches:
The seedlings, Chinese-American hybrids, are among 14,000 chestnut trees being set atop reclaimed Appalachian strip mines through the end of 2014. The deployment, by far the largest to date, is seen as a crucial test of the tree’s ability to go it alone in wild forests full of predators and other species of trees competing for sunlight and nutrients.

At the same time, scientists at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse are readying new trials of an entirely different chestnut — not a hybrid, but one that has been modified with a gene from wheat that enables it to produce a blight-fighting enzyme....