New ash borer discovery in Iowa 'sad and frustrating'

The emerald ash borer, the pest native to Asia that has killed millions of trees in the last decade in more than a dozen states, has been found in a second spot in Eastern Iowa, state officials said Tuesday.

The new positive identification of the bug has come in a residential tree in Burlington situated along the Mississippi River in southeast Iowa, State Entomologist Robin Pruisner of the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship said.

The new find comes three years after the pest was first found in Allamakee County on an island in the Mississippi River.

Pruisner said she will be issuing a quarantine for Burlington and Des Moines County, where the tree is located, in the near future. A quarantine by state and U.S. agriculture departments means that hardwood firewood, ash logs and wood chips cannot be moved out of the area without a permit.

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Daniel Gibbins, the city's parks superintendent, said Tuesday the new discovery of the ash borer was as “sad and frustrating” as it was unsurprising.

Burlington, he said, is situated on the state's “eastern front,” where the state had its first emerald ash borer arrival three years ago in Allamakee County along the Mississippi River. The borer has moved in waves through states, except in instances where it has been transported by people moving firewood, and the expectation is that it will move deeper into the state, he said.

“I think it really punctuates the point of looking into the future as we manage both our urban and natural woodlands,” Gibbins said. “Any kind of forestry management always looks decades into the future. It's very important for Cedar Rapids and other municipalities to take this seriously, and I think we are.”

He noted that the city has had an active program for a few years now of removing ash trees that are in decline along city streets and replacing them with a diversity of tree species other than ash. The same is true in city parks and golf courses, but most of the city's resources have been focused on street trees, Gibbins said.

He said cities and foresters learned from the Dutch elm disease disaster decades ago and have planted a more diverse mix of trees to avoid have a city's trees decimated with the arrival of the next pest or disease. Even so, Iowa still has a lot of ash trees and some older Cedar Rapids neighborhoods still have streets with many ash trees, Gibbins said.

However, Cedar Rapids streets with new plantings in the last decade have a wide diversity of trees other than ash planted along them. The city attempts to plant species native to Iowa and the Midwest, such as oak, hackberry, Kentucky coffee tree, new cultivars of elm, maple and honey locust, Gibbins said.