2018-09-24 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – September 24, 2018 NP: But can the tree recover from it? SB: Not if it’s got the whole tree. A branch that may be infected could be cut off and then you need to seal that wound with prune sealer as best you can. So that’s possible but Huli Ohia will kill the entire tree and if the entire tree is dead and it’s got the ambrosia beetles in it – if you can put the tree on the ground without damaging other trees around it and do it safely then that is the recommendation because that way you don’t have the possibility or you have less of a possibility of the beetle frasse and the boring dust which has the active spores being carried by the wind. NP: Right, right, I had an opportunity recently to have a helicopter tour of Puna and, yeah, it looked to me like 90% of the ohia are dead and it was a shocking reality and my question is in this brochure you say that the ohia are the backbone of Hawaii’s native forest and watershed – now what? They’re dead – what about the watershed. Is there any plans, I mean, you know... You can’t bring back a whole tree in the near future... SB: No. And Puna is a very extreme example of what’s happened with eco systems there coupled with the fact that it’s a lower elevation and the understory beneath that canopy of ohia is typically non-native plants – I’m afraid the forests of Puna are in pretty dire straits from a native ecosystem standpoint... NP: So that may be just for the sake of vegetation maybe don’t kill the trees anymore maybe... SB: Absolutely. No. We don’t want to kill the native trees but the ones... NP: I’m sorry – the non-native... SB: Oh, OK. In the best thing we can do for our watersheds is to keep it clothed in forest and vegetation – clearly. Ohia has been here for many, many, many hundreds of thousands of years. It is the backbone of our native forest. It’s 80% of the total biomass of our native forest is ohia trees – there’s lots of other things in there – but when you look at the total biomass of an area it’s been said about 80% of that is ohia. Puna, as I said, is an extreme example l- there are many other places on the Island here and we look – that aren’t anywhere as nearly as badly affected by Rapid Ohia Death – your ohia trees aren’t. We fly the whole Island – all the ohia forests on the Island in a helicopter doing digital mapping twice a year and then in the priority areas where there are those edges where we’re trying to monitor to keep – to see if it’s spreading we do those in the off quarters as well – so four times a year those areas get flown and we’re mapping – we did that last week – we did a portion of the Island last week Friday – all of Kau, a portion of South Kona 14