Dealing with Sooty Bark Disease

[Gavint]

Hi All, had an interesting job yesterday. We had to fell two Sycamores (Planetree Maples for us North Americans) for the City that were severely damaged by sooty bark disease, Crytomeria corticale.

 

Both trees had had a risk assessment done on them last summer, and there were no signs of the disease at that point. In the last few months, both trees experienced a massive amount of dieback, with big chunks of bark flaking off and black fungal spore masses on the underlying wood.

 

The local Tree assessor explained that in a recent trip to Sudtirol in Italy, they have had to remove virtually 100 percent of their Sycamores because of this disease. Now, it's jumped over the Alps and is affecting trees here in southern Germany, just coming over in the last couple of years. It's interesting how fast the disease seems to work.

 

When felling, we all wore respirators or dust masks in addition to the normal safety gear... Got a lot of Darth Vader jokes. Luke...kshhh...Ich bin dein Vater...

 

We ran all of the branches through the chipper, and dropped off the wood at a place to be burned separately, not to be used as firewood.

 

How bad is this thing where you are? How are you guys disposing of the contaminated wood? I wonder about chipping the wood, I guess the major danger is for the guy feeding the machine, the spores would diffuse pretty quickly in the surrounding air to non-dangerous levels.

 

I'd like to know how others are dealing with this problem. I'll upload some photos next week.

 

Cheers,

Gavin

[treeseer]

Cryptostroma is the genus, because the fungal stroma are 'hidden' in the inner bark?

 

A bad actor in Populus here. Never seen it in Acer, that I know of. Hope I never do!