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Saving the world’s ash forests calls for international cooperation now

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 3, pages 141–144 (2019)Cite this article

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Ash forests in North America and Eurasia are rapidly being lost to two invasive alien species: the emerald ash borer and Chalara ash dieback fungus. We argue that better regulatory policy and science-based intervention can help slow losses, and recommend an international consortium to coordinate science-based intervention.

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Fig. 1: Ash (Fraxinus) species distribution and secondary ranges of two invaders, EAB (A. planipennis; www.emeraldashborer.info)6 and Chalara ADF (H. fraxineus)13,15.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank I. Danilova (Research Scientist, Sukachev Institute of Forest of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Krasnoyarsk, Russian Federation) for help with generating the distribution maps and A. D. Orlinski (Scientific Officer, European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organization, Paris, France) for his critical remarks and suggestions. D.S.-C. was supported by the European Commission under the Forest and Nature for Society (FONASO) Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Program. Y.N.B. was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (no. 17-04-01486a). E.D.K. was supported by the Villum Foundation grant (grant no. VKR023062).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Forest Genetics and Forest Tree Breeding, Georg-August University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany

    Devrim Semizer-Cuming & Konstantin V. Krutovsky

  2. Forest, Nature and Biomass, Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Devrim Semizer-Cuming & Erik D. Kjӕr

  3. Laboratory of Population Genetics, Vavilov Institute of General Genetics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russian Federation

    Konstantin V. Krutovsky

  4. Laboratory of Forest Genomics, Genome Research and Education Center, Siberian Federal University, Krasnoyarsk, Russian Federation

    Konstantin V. Krutovsky

  5. Department of Ecosystem Science and Management, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

    Konstantin V. Krutovsky

  6. Sukachev Institute of Forest FRC KSC of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Krasnoyarsk, Russian Federation

    Yuri N. Baranchikov

  7. Department of Environmental Sciences, American University, Washington DC, USA

    Claire G. Williams

Authors
  1. Devrim Semizer-Cuming
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  3. Yuri N. Baranchikov
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  4. Erik D. Kjӕr
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  5. Claire G. Williams
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Correspondence to Devrim Semizer-Cuming or Claire G. Williams.

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Semizer-Cuming, D., Krutovsky, K.V., Baranchikov, Y.N. et al. Saving the world’s ash forests calls for international cooperation now. Nat Ecol Evol 3, 141–144 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0761-6

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