2017-02-17 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes — February 13, 2017 3. Corie Yanger and JB Friday of the UH Cooperative Extension Services to bring us an update on Rapid Ohia Death research. (Time swapped with Chief Farrell — change in agenda) JB: Thanks, on to rapid ohia death. I think most of you have been through at least one presentation. I'm gonna try to skip through or move fast through the parts you've seen. We've actually had a really interesting discussion of most of the scientists working on it for about four hours this morning. This afternoon, I changed a few slides and added a few points. There's some new stuff in the presentation. We've got quite a collaborative team working on this — Tom Harrington — who's the white bearded guy in the middle. He's the guy that wrote the textbook on Ceratocystis diseases, He's been out here. It's his fourth trip in the past year. The DOFAW's been funding him to come out and he's worked on these diseases around the world to really have a lot of input on this, but we've got people from every agency, private — all kinds of different working group that phones in once a month, meets the people that are here. There's over 200 people now working on this. The background is that since about 2010, we've noticed a lot of additional mortality above and beyond normal ohia mortality. Starting in the Puna district, these two pictures are the same spot — the red spot is the same spot. Couple things to see from this is in four years you had a lot of dead trees. The dead trees occupy a discreet area so there's a patch of dead trees. These patches are like one to a hundred acres and then there's healthy forest beyond that. Not all the trees in the area are dead so there are alive ones still in the area. I want to stress that this came to our attention not because agency people were out in the forest looking for it — it's because landowners were pointing out — calling us up and saying trees are dying — what's going on? JB: We gave it the name before we knew what it was — rapid ohia death — because what people were telling us is trees are dying very quickly and this is different than what we'd seen with normal ohia mortality. A tree would go from green to yellow and brown in two weeks. We saw things that looked like they were always healthy ohia dying — there's no external — one thing I want to stress there's no external funguses — this turned out to be a fungal disease, but the fungus is.in the sapwood — there's nothing on the bark — there's nothing external that you see in this so that's one of the new things I wanted to stress. This is a forest in lower Puna near Pahoa that I was fortunate enough to visit 2005 — was pretty much pristine lowland ohia forest — very few invasives. Some rare plants in the understory - ohia, lama — over story in the forest in 2005. This is what it looked like ten years later. We have about 98% of the trees dead — what's coming in the understory is all weeds and pretty much we've lost that forest. So this is the worst case scenario of what this disease can do. Where is the forest going and again I am a forester so I'm not the pathologist or the entomologist on the program. Where the forest is going 9