Dr. Bob Marra, Research Plant Pathologist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, has asked CTPA to post the following.  He is asking arborists to help him locate American elms, to help him with a study on Dutch elm disease.  Here is Bob’s request:

“My colleague at UMass, Dr. Nicholas Brazee, and I have initiated a project to study American elms that have been receiving regular injections to control Dutch elm disease (DED).  Our goal is to nondestructively assess these trees for evidence of internal decay and xylem dysfunction, using sonic and electrical resistance tomography. We are both skilled in the use of this equipment, having used it for a separate study quantifying internal decay in northern hardwoods.

We are looking for American elms in southern New England (CT, MA, RI) that have been receiving trunk injections for control of DED, and for which records of injection history are available. We will also need approval by the trees’ owners. We would be happy to contact owners for approval or to leave that up to you. We’d also be happy to involve you and your colleagues in the process.  We would make the data, which are generated in real-time, available to you and to the trees’ owners.

Additionally, for baseline data, we would like to tomograph some American elms that are both free of DED and which have not undergone trunk injections.

You need not contact me if you have already contacted Nick Brazee in response to a similar request he sent out recently.

The best way to respond to this request is to email me at Robert.Marra@ct.gov.”

To learn more about Bob’s research, visit his webpage on the CT Agricultural Experiment Station website.  On that page, he has posted some images from both sonic and electrical impedance tomography that illustrate how these techniques can be used to assess internal decay in trees.