New effort to track Sudden Oak Death in Sonoma County

Guy Kovner, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Dozens of volunteers are expected to comb Sonoma County woodlands in two weeks looking for the telltale signs of a tree killer.
They will be hunting for discolored leaves on bay laurels, evidence that those trees harbor the sudden oak death pathogen, which has infected more than 105,000 acres in the county.
Sudden oak death, discovered in Marin County in 1995, has killed more than 3 million tanoak and oak trees in 15 counties from from Monterey to Humboldt, according to UC Berkeley’s Forest Pathology Laboratory.
Taking advantage of what is expected to be another dry spring, the lab is focusing its seventh annual Sudden Oak Death Blitz on pinpointing the bay trees that are “reservoirs” of the pathogen, a fungus-like microbe called Phytophthora ramorum.
via New effort to track Sudden Oak Death in Sonoma County | The Press Democrat.
Sudden Oak Death Blitzes will be conducted from now through the end of May in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, with the Sonoma County blitz on April 19 and 20.
Sonoma County volunteers are expected to attend one of four training sessions April 19. The classes will last about an hour, followed by surveying and sampling trees that day and the next.
The classes are at:
• Sebastopol Center for the Arts, 282 South High St., Sebastopol, 9 a.m. to 10 a.m.
• Spring Lake Park Environmental Discovery Center, 5585 Newanga Ave., Santa Rosa, 9 a.m. to 10 a.m.
• Cloverdale Historical Society, 215 N. Cloverdale Blvd., Cloverdale, 11 a.m. to noon.
• Sonoma Community Center, 276 East Napa St., Sonoma, 9 a.m. to 10 a.m.
For more information on the classses, contact Lisa Bell, Sonoma County’s sudden oak death program coordinator, at lkbell@ucdavis.edu.