Student Volunteers Plant 150 Chestnut Seedlings at DEWA

On Monday April 27, 2019, an enthusiastic group of student volunteers and their teacher from the Wallenpaupack Area High School (WAHS) Eco-Team helped with a restoration project at Dingmans Falls in Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area.

NPS Photo

In March 2018, a powerful nor'easter brought heavy snow and damaging winds to Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, which caused the downing of many large trees throughout much of the park. Typically, after an event like this, invasive exotic plants move in and start to dominate the landscape.

To help prevent this from happening, the park, in cooperation with The American Chestnut Foundation (TACF), combined forces to procure and plant hundreds of backcrossed American chestnut (Castanea dentata) seedlings. The American Chestnut Foundation has been the leader in research and restoration efforts to restore the American chestnut, an important historical component of the ecosystem.

According to the foundation, more than a century ago, nearly 4 billion American chestnut trees were growing in the eastern U.S. They were among the largest, tallest, and fastest-growing trees. The wood was rot-resistant, straight-grained, and suitable for furniture, fencing, and building. The nuts fed billions of birds and animals. It was almost a perfect tree, that is, until a blight fungus killed it more than a century ago. The chestnut blight has been called the greatest ecological disaster to strike the world’s forests in all of history. The American chestnut tree survived all adversaries for 40 million years, then disappeared within 40 years due to the inadvertent introduction of a fungus, Cryphonectria parasitica, the causal agent of chestnut blight. This disease reduced the American chestnut from its position as the dominant tree species in the eastern forest ecosystem to little more than an early-succession-stage shrub.

For the past 30 years TACF has researched back crossing American chestnuts with fungus resistant Asian varieties to produce a generation of trees that are genetically 97% American chestnut and 3% Asian - basically American chestnuts with blight resistance.

These plots of downed trees in the park offer restoration sites that should discourage deer depredation while allowing for sunlight and favorable conditions to nurture the seedlings. The WAHS student volunteers worked hard and planted 150 seedlings on a steep slope near Dingmans Falls.

The park is grateful to the dedicated WAHS Eco-Team student volunteers, their teacher Mrs. Linda Lohner, and The American Chestnut Foundation for all of their help in restoring and important part of the Eastern hardwood ecosystem.