White pine blister rust: the nemesis of North American white pines

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White pine blister rustthe nemesis of North
American white pines

• A presentation by
• Kristen M. Baker

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Blister rust cankers sugar pine whitebark pine
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Top kill in whitebark pine
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Cronartium ribicolathe causal agent

• Complex system involving 5 spore stages and two
  hosts
• Pinus and Ribes
• Introduced into North America around 1900 on
  infected eastern white pine stock separate
  introductions on east and west coasts
• Native and Asia

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C. ribicola life cycle
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A Few Pathogen Details

• Low genetic diversity in N.A.
• High diversity between subpopulations
• Indicative of frequent founder events and little
  gene flow
• Genetic center Asia
• To infect white pines 48 hours lt68 F, 100
  relative humidity

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Attempts to control WPBR

• Ribes eradication
• Not successful except a few isolated incidents
• Use of Risk Zones for planting and management
• potential pitfalls must also account for airflow
  patterns
• Pruning
• Can be successful costly may need repeated
  entries probably would not work in whitebark
• Genetics probably most successful method
• Sugar and western white pines
• Whitebark pine work in progress

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Widespread mortality in western white pine
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Pruning research in sugar pine
before...
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Pruning research in sugar pine
...after
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The tree host white pines

• Genus Pinus
• Hapoxylon subgroup
• Five-needled
• Eastern and western white pines, whitebark,
  sugar, limber, southwestern white, foxtail (and
  potentially the bristlecone pines)
• Whitebark is closely related to European stone
  pines, where rust is endemic

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Some details on Pinus
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Eastern white pine (P. strobus)

• Largely cut over prior to rust, so loss due to
  rust minimal, but regenerating difficult
• Only tree where Ribes control was mildly
  successful
• Most land managers wont risk it in high risk
  zones

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Whitebark pine (P. albicaulis)

• High elevations in the western US and Canada
• Keystone species slow growth
• Mutualistic relationship
• with nutcracker
• Wildlife dependence on nuts
• Restoration treatments a helping hand for a tree
  with a bleak future

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Western white pine (P. monticola)

• Largely disappeared from the Inland Northwest,
  where it was once most valuable timber species
• Like eastern, avoided in plantings
• Changing species comp. and structure made forest
  more susceptible to fire, insects and other
  pathogens

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Sugar pine (P. lambertiana)

• CA and PNW
• Tree of largest stature in mixed-conifer forests
• Few native pests, none causing such widespread
  mortality
• Also avoided in some planted settings

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Tree resistance

• Major gene for resistance
• Found in sugar, western white, and southwestern
  white so far
• Thought to be gene-for-gene (because virulent
  race of pathogen neutralizes this gene)
• Gene-for-gene typically indicates a pathosystem
  in which the host and pathogen have evolved over
  long time periods- so what is going on in this
  system?

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A quick review of gene-for-gene resistance
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Lesion types sugar pine
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Additional types of tree resistance

• Sugar pine
• Slow rusting resistance - many components of
  resistance combined into a single phenotypic
  expression, exhibited as amount and type of
  infection with moderately strong inheritance and
  independently inherited expressions (low
  infection and high infection abortion)
• Ontogenetic resistance - another phenotypic
  expression that develops as the tree ages under
  genetic controls offspring may be fully
  susceptible

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Additional types of tree resistance, contd

• Western white pine
• Slow canker growth - non race specific trait
  produces abnormally small cankers may reduce
  pruning necessity (due to success)
• Reduced needle lesion frequency - also non race
  specific trait few individual infection sites
  per seedling may only be juvenile trait (seen in
  cotyledons)

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References
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References, contd
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