2017-02-17 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes — February 13, 2017 — as you know a lot of these forests are badly invaded with weeds such as strawberry guava — some of these forests like in Wao Kele in Puna where the ohia blinks out it's just gonna get taken over by strawberry guava — we've pretty much lost that forest — there are other forests — such as — some of this is up in the Wailuku River about half way up the Wailuku River where there's gonna be some ohia mortality but other trees are coming in — you're gonna see more koa, you're gonna see more hapu'u and some other things so the forest will remain a native Hawaiian forest but it'll be a different one - changed by the impact of this disease. OK. Two new points on this map, sadly. This is a map of samples that people have brought into the lab or that we've collected and analyzed and found Ceratocystis on them. To retain people's privacy, these dots are two miles wide so you can't find out exactly who has it. I want to be confidential for the landowners who have it — but it does give you an idea of where it initially was found and where it spread to. We initially found it down in lower Puna below Pahoa — 2013. By 2014, it had spread throughout lower Puna and it was up as far as Hawaiian Acres, Orchidland, Hawaiian Paradise Park. By 2015, we found it throughout South Hilo and up the Kona side. Last year, we found it as far north as Kaloko Mauka. Then in November, we found one tree with it in Laupahoehoe. Couple more spots that I just learned about today — the first spot that was identified positively inside Hawaii Volcanoes National Park — Kilauea Unit — down Chain of Craters Road — and up in the Kau Forest Reserve. Those are a couple new spots that I learned about today. This is a CERT map of an aerial survey that DLNR flew last January looking at what looked like the disease from the air — so the combination of the spots that we found and what looks like it from the air to kinda gives you a picture of where it is on the island. There's a lot of ohia mortality in the forests of these yellow blurs on here are areas that are dead ohia, but we can tell from the air that's something else. The red ones could be this disease and we're proceeding to check. Obviously, you see the lower Puna stuff, - we know that's it — you see that big outbreak in lower Kona, and South Kona. When they added up all the areas that looked like were affected, it came to 47,000 acres affected. Now that's affected — that's not 47,000 acres of dead forest. That' 47,000 acres of forest that you see at least ten percent mortality. The very worst spots are 98% mortality but a lot of this is well, we see some scattered dead trees in this area here. The follow-up and discovery what the disease was — we eventually started felling the trees. When we felled the trees, we noticed this staining — so if you look at the two slides on the bottom — you see sort of a radial black staining. The blues are chalk numbering the slices — but that radial black staining - see that black staining around the radius of the thing — that we saw — we felled trees — we took slices out up and down the tree to see where the fungus is — and identified the fungus from that. The fungus was cultured — it came out as the genus Ceratocystis. There are many pathogenic fungi in Ceratocystis — our colleagues at USDA ARS figured 10