Those verdant ash trees lining your drive could be grey, ragged wrecks in a few years.
But Manitoba researchers are hoping to give farmers and city people a sweet replacement to the popular tree.
They think the sugar maple, a tree popular in the East, could be developed to line farm drives and throw shade on city streets.
“You may not realize it, but this sugar maple above me represents innovation,” said David Gislason, an Interlake farmer and chair of the Agrifood Research and Development Initiative (ARDI), as he stood beneath a leafy sugar maple in the Winnipeg neighbourhood of River Heights.
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ARDI funding of $66,000 will be used to speed the development of prairie-tough sugar maple trees.
The University of Manitoba and commercial breeders are trying to turn the eastern sugar maple into a tree that can handle extreme cold, high heat and occasional drought.
Manitoba is home to silver maples, Manitoba maples and a few other varieties, but the sugar maple is considered the best alternative.
Although the other maple varieties are already biologically designed to survive prairie winters, they can also spread rapidly, becoming weeds that demand control. Sugar maples generally don’t.
The project will allow breeders to skip ahead in breeding time by using microcutting and shoot organogenesis techniques, rather than relying upon much slower bud-grafting or seedling development.
The need for speed is due to the onslaught of the emerald ash borer, which has been ravaging ash trees since arriving in North America from China.
Winnipeg is home to thousands of ash trees – they rank second to elm trees in population – and hundreds of thousands of ash trees make cities like Edmonton and towns and farm lanes across the Prairies green.
Trees are often taken for granted, seen not as valuable commodities but merely as ornamentation. But in Winnipeg alone, the value of the urban forest has been calculated at more than $600 million.
Tree production is also an industry on the Prairies, which is why tree research scientist and nursery operator Philip Ronald is involved with the project.
He wants to develop, produce and sell new sugar maple varieties for the prairie market and hopes this project allows breeders like him to move faster. He is confident modern methods will allow him to skip the years of development required with traditional tree breeding.
“I believe the results of this study will be immediate,” he said.
Already researchers are working with a northwestern Minnesota variety known as KN03 that shows much promise, he said.
Ronald said boosting breeding funding now is ideal, because the emerald ash borer hasn’t yet appeared in big numbers in the Prairies.
“We should be working on replacements now.”
