You'll have less shade along Monsarrat Avenue soon. More banyan trees are falling victim to an invasive plant pest.

Click here to watch Nana Ohkawa's story.

City officials say combating the pest is an uphill battle.

These Benjamin Banyan trees have withstood a lot in their 50 years fronting Kapiolani Regional Park, but they couldn't stand up to the Lobate Lac Scale. It's a one-centimeter pest that's proven to be too much.

Residents noticed the trees slowly dying.

"I could tell something was wrong because they don't have any leaves on them. It's sad," said Waikiki resident Wanda Gardner.

"Hopefully they replace them with similar trees because they give a lot of shade," said Jose Lopez, a Waikiki resident.

When arborists spotted the infection three months ago they tried to save them with a pesticide.

"It's injected in the base of the tree. The tree uptakes it into the branches and causes the Lobate Lac Scale to sometimes recede," said Chris Dacus of the Department of Parks and Recreation.

But, the treatment failed.

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Tree pest leads to removal of many Waikiki banyan trees

From studying tree rings to creating intricate computer models, scientists are trying to understand why flames behave the way they do.

Ecologist Don Falk points out a fire scar on a fallen tree stump. (Brian L. Frank)

In a stand of ponderosa pine trees high in the Santa Catalina Mountains overlooking Tucson, Arizona, forest-and-fire ecologist Don Falk squatted with me next to a 100-foot-tall tree born a decade or two before American independence. At the base of the trunk, the tree's thick cinnamon-colored bark gave way to a shallow opening a foot wide and two feet high that looked like a series of successively smaller triangles. Falk ran his hand along the charred edges of the opening and explained what we were looking at: a window into the forest's past, and fire's role in shaping it.

Falk studies fire-scarred trees to understand how frequent, severe, and widespread fires have been in an area, and how those patterns have shifted over the centurieswhich is also a key to understanding why some fires are bigger, more unpredictable, and more destructive these days, How do you know anything on Earth has changed? he asks. You have to be able to compare it to how things were in the past. This is how we know the history.

Fire on the Mountain: Making Sense of the Yarnell Disaster

Long before the Mexican-American War, when this land still belonged to Mexico, a fire swept up this mountain slope. Short flames wrapped around the tree and curled like an eddy in a stream, lingering on the back side, where accumulated leaves and pine needles caught fire. The flames stayed long enough to penetrate the bark and killed a portion of the cambium, which produces new cells. The tree slowly healed itself, pushing edges of new growth onto the dead area, year after year. But the scar remained. The next fire that came through left another scar, and the next fire another. If we examined a cross-section of the tree, we could use the rings to figure out the exact year of each fire.

Falk works down in the valley at the University of Arizona's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, which occupies a gleaming new four-story glass-and-metal cube and holds 2 million wood specimens from around the world, the largest archive of its kind. The lab's founder, an astronomer named Andrew Ellicott Douglass, created a new discipline called dendrochronology: the analysis of tree rings to interpret and date past events. He used rings to date ancient Aztec and Pueblo ruins in the southwest by studying trees used in their construction, and he found that trees in the region grow more in wet years than in dry years, a first step in our understanding of climate change.

Falk, his face tanned by long days in the field, walked with me through the pines. He stopped at a large ponderosa-pine stump, two feet across, cut smooth by a chainsaw. To understand wildfire today, everything we've done to try to control it, and the problems those efforts have wrought, this was a good place to start. He brushed fallen pine needles from the stump and offered a quick reading of the tree's fire history: Born in the mid-1700s, it shows scarring from fires every decade or two, the rings curled like breaking waves around the wound. But something curious happens after the marks from an early-1900s fire: the scars stop. The tree rings continue out toward the edge, for decades, slowly healing that last fire wound, until the tree died several years ago.

The Mysterious Science of Fire

Where did the fires go? Grazing animals consumed some of the fuels that would have carried fire. Then, a century ago, we embarked on a campaign to banish fires from forests, with a goal of extinguishing them soon after they started. But that wasn't such a good thing for the forest. When fires don't come through regularly, fuels accumulate. A couple of centuries ago, forests like this one in the southwest might have had a few dozen trees per acre, widely spaced, with an open, savannah-like floor. Today an acre might be crowded with thousands of mostly smaller trees. When fires do burn, they're more destructive, often killing the big trees along with the small.

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How to Read the Mind of a Wildfire

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When completed, Main Street Cupertino will have a new tree canopy to boast alongside the new dining, retail and common areas.

The Cupertino City Council on May 20 unanimously granted a tree removal permit to the developers of Main Street Cupertino. The permit grants developers permission to remove and replace a couple dozen trees that are unhealthy and in conflict with on-site utilities.

Of the 24 private non-specimen trees to be removed, 23 are Shamel Ash trees and one is a Chinese elm. The trees range from 10 to 23 inches in diameter.

Most trees will be replaced by 24-inch Americana Ash and Flowering Pears. In total, 420 trees are proposed for the project, according to a Cupertino city staff report.

The council also will have public works look into the possible removal and replacement of 48 public non-specimen street trees at the site of the project: 45 Shamel Ash and three Autumn Purple White Ash.

Developers have been working since about 2007 on turning a swath of vacant Cupertino land into the city's first true downtown setting. Main Street Cupertino will include retail shops, restaurants, office space, loft-style apartments, a town square and a hotel catering to business travelers. Outdoor seating, walkable retail shopping and an entry plaza are some of the plans for the property bounded by Stevens Creek Boulevard, Finch Avenue, Tantau Avenue and Vallco Parkway.

The city council initially approved the project in 2009, but the site was dormant through 2011 until applicants returned to the city asking for two modifications to make the project more financially viable in order to break ground. In September 2012, the city council approved another round of modifications. A ground-breaking ceremony was held last September.

In February, the council approved the removal of four trees on Stevens Creek Boulevard along the property berm, and up to 17 ash trees along Tantau Avenue that were found to be dead or unhealthy. Since the February meeting, developers and the city's consulting arborist gathered more information on where utilities and construction impact zones might be.

Shamel Ashes in particular were singled out as problematic street trees due to their invasive surface root system and "excessive limb and branch weight which can present danger to persons and property," according to the staff report.

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Main Street Cupertino developers to replace unhealthy trees

Posted: Thursday, May 29, 2014 9:48 am

County introduces new Fitzgerald plan By Julia Reis [ julia@hmbreview.com ] Half Moon Bay Review |

San Mateo County Parks officials have scaled back the number of cypress trees they plan to remove from the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve after Coastsiders sent numerous emails to the department expressing concerns about the need for tree removal.

Of the groves 1,068 trees, 11 living trees and 34 dead trees will be removed, and 56 will be trimmed, according to a revised plan that was introduced to Coastsiders at a meeting on Thursday evening. While the exact number of trees County Parks planned to remove was not known in January when vegetation management plans were first discussed with the public, County Parks Director Marlene Finley said at the time that 134 trees were dead and most were slated for removal.

Around 20 people turned out for the meeting and provided a lot of feedback for the department, Finley said.

A number of people were urging us to really look at the aesthetic of which limbs do we trim and how do we go about trimming them, Finley said. It was very constructive and I feel confident that were on the right track.

To help Coastsiders visualize what the forest would look like with these trees removed and trimmed, County Parks plans to enlist the help of a local photographer who volunteered to Photoshop a current picture of the trees to reflect these changes.

The revised plan also calls for removing the nonnative ice plant close to the mouth of San Vicente Creek and replanting it with shrubs and small trees.

Suggestions that arose from the meeting included a request to remove the eucalyptus trees within the cypress grove and not to fence off a rare chestnut tree in the forest. Finley said County Parks will likely forgo fencing off the tree and will look into removing the non-native eucalyptus.

After the outcry in January, County Parks indicated in April that it was no longer looking to adopt a five-year project plan, but rather to complete stages as pilot projects that would be revised and adopted on an individual basis.

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County introduces new Fitzgerald plan

by Tiffany Craig / KHOU 11 News

khou.com

Posted on May 28, 2014 at 10:54 PM

HOUSTON -- Tree trimming and removal businesses have been booming for days thanks to the rain.

"We've been swamped with calls," said Adam Cavazos, owner of Adam's Tree Service. "Trees falling all over and uprooted."

We caught up with his crew at Thomas Barnes' house near Terry Hershey park in West Harris County.

"It came down in the night," said Barnes. "We had a lot of rain, lot of wind."

All over Southeast Texas, falling trees have wreaked havoc.

Cavazos says your best defense is to get to know what's in your yard.

Trees such as the Hackberry, Post Oak or Pin Oak are all large with weak roots. They are the ones most likely to fall after heavy rains.

Read more:
Flooding leads to abundance of fallen trees in Houston area

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