An Anonymous Coward writes:
http://scienceline.org/2017/01/american-chestnut-tree-good-shot-making-comeback/
Once 25% of the forest in the American northeast, the American chestnut tree has been nearly wiped out by a fungal disease, which started about 100 years ago. The article has a number of interesting stories including a quote from Henry David Thoreau.
The American Chestnut Foundation http://www.acf.org/ has been selectively breeding to give fungal resistance for the last 30 years, but it's slow going. It takes 4-5 years before the seedlings flower and can be crossed again. They planted 150,000 resistant hybrids last year as an initial test. Going forward they plan to sequence some candidates to help select for further work.
In parallel, another group have identified a resistant gene in wheat and inserted it into a chestnut. While a faster process, it is recognized that a single GMO variety would have no diversity and would have problems in the wild. If this goes forward, the GMO is likely to be bred by traditional means against a wide variety of other chestnuts before being released.
For its part, the American Chestnut Foundation agrees that the best path forward is to combine the two approaches. "It's not an either-or [question], we need both," says Lisa Thomson, president and CEO of the Foundation.
...
Ultimately, the stakes are higher than just one species. Threatened by pests and foreign diseases, other classic North American trees such as ash, walnut and hemlock, might need help surviving into the next century. Successes with the chestnut tree could provide lessons that help conservationists save those trees as well, and perhaps ensure a diverse forest that can provide a habitat for living things, including people who enjoy hiking through woods more like those Thoreau walked through over 150 years ago.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday February 14 2017, @06:36PM
Estimates range from 10 to more than 100 million people in the Americas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_population [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday February 14 2017, @07:17PM
I've read high estimates like that. It makes sense given the complexity of earthworks and such that pre-contact cultures created. I do wonder why we haven't found more skeletal remains, mass graves, etc, from that time frame that would substantiate a dramatic reduction in population due to disease. Is it simply that no real archaeology has been done, or that European settlers building on the remains of Indian villages obliterated the evidence?
We do know that the Pilgrims settled on the site of Squanto's home village, which had been home to several thousand people when he was kidnapped by European sailors, but had vanished by the time he was finally able to make his way back. Italy and Greece have laws that say excavation has to be done by archaeologists whenever construction crews hit ancient remains, but I don't know if America has anything comprehensive like that.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday February 14 2017, @10:55PM
I do wonder why we haven't found more skeletal remains, mass graves, etc, from that time frame that would substantiate a dramatic reduction in population due to disease.
These authors seem to think a dramatic loss of population in Mexico in the 16th Century is substantiated.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2730237/ [nih.gov]