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The Portland Press Herald published two articles on August 27 related to the work Thomas Klak, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Environmental Studies, to preserve the American chestnut tree.

As described in the article, “After decades of blight, Mainers could help save the American chestnut,” the species was all but destroyed over 100 years ago by a blight that still affects the few remaining trees today. Klak, working with students in the Ecological Restoration course that he teaches every spring, as well as with partners at Unity College and University of Maine Orono, created four “germplasm orchards” around the state of Maine to preserve the genetic diversity of the Maine’s surviving American chestnuts.

Klak, who serves as chairman of the gene conservation committee at the Maine chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation, works to crossbreed American chestnut trees with blight resistant Chinese chestnut trees to ultimately achieve hybrid trees that are 15/sixteenths American chestnut. “We’re now at the point where we have the sixth generation in Maine,” Klak said in the article. “We’re in the process in the next couple of years of selecting what we consider the best 10 percent of the trees that are relatively blight resistant.”

Another approach to saving the species relies on creating a genetically modified American chestnut by inserting a gene from wheat into the species’ genome to give it blight resistance. Klak addressed the potential controversy of this approach in a separate Press Herald article, titled “Will a genetically modified tree harm the environment?” Although the effort to restore the American chestnut population is not motivated by financial gain, and the genetic modification involved is not as controversial as genetically modified organisms that people associate with food, Klak noted that if the federal government approves the transgenic tree for dissemination, the new breed “will inherit the controversy that is associated with GMO.”

Whether the answer lies in hybridization, genetic modification, another method, or a combination of approaches, Klak is hopeful that success in saving the American chestnut will translate to triumph in preserving other troubled species like ash and hemlock. “It would be an amazing ecological turnaround,” he said of the potential remedy for American chestnut extinction, “and it could be a model for ecological restoration as a whole. We have a lot of trees that are being subjected to different kinds of pathogens. So if we can turn this around for this keystone species, then it could be a model for bringing back healthy forests.”

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