If you suspect you’ve seen a butternut tree, Mia Murray and T’ai Roulston are willing to travel to investigate. (Photos by Lathan Goumas, University Communications)
Since 1967, the native butternut tree has been rapidly disappearing from forests across the East Coast and University of Virginia scientists are asking the public to help them counteract this loss.
Researchers at Blandy Experimental Farm, the University’s environmental research facility, are asking people across Virginia to help them find remaining trees. T’ai Roulston, a research associate professor of environmental sciences, is leading the campaign.
Helping in the effort is Mia Murray, who first came to Blandy in 2021 as an undergraduate student from Wheaton College, funded through the National Science Foundation’s Research Experience for Undergraduates program. After graduating and working in Panama, Montana and Minnesota, she was drawn back to UVA, where she is now pursuing a master’s degree in environmental sciences and working with Roulston to preserve the butternut species.
Murray spoke with UVA Today about why the butternuts are in decline and how Blandy researchers are collaborating with citizen scientists to better understand the surviving populations.
Q. What’s going on with the butternuts?
Murray is pursuing a master's degree in environmental sciences at UVA. (Photo by Lathan Goumas, University Communications)
A. When a lot of people think of threats to forests, they think of fires and human impacts, but pests and pathogens can also do a lot of damage, like in the case of the American chestnut. The butternut is a tree that has been really cherished and used by a lot of different communities up and down the eastern U.S. for millennia. In 1967, there was the first observance of something called “butternut canker disease,” a non-native fungal pathogen that infects the trees. It works its way into the trunk and causes these cankers, eventually girdling the tree, which means that it prevents nutrients from reaching the leaves and kills the tree over time.
Along the East Coast and Midwest, certain states have experienced anywhere from 50% to 90% loss of butternut trees in the wild, which is a pretty large-scale loss in a relatively quick time span. Virginia has been largely overlooked in a lot of studies and efforts, so even though we know what’s happening across the range, we don’t really have a good idea of what’s happening here.
Q. What is your project’s focus?
A. My project is looking to find trees in Virginia to assess the wild populations and understand the disease severity. Then we’re going to collect samples for genetic sequencing to differentiate between pure butternuts and the hybrids with the Japanese walnut, because it’s really hard to tell the difference between pure and hybrid butternuts. While the hybrids are more resistant to butternut canker disease, they are more susceptible to other diseases in the landscape.
A lot of times, data people help collect stays within the walls of academia, so I will be sharing my results in person and online in the fall with my participants, with project reports outlining all the information they helped me collect.
Q. How are you working with the public on this?
A. T’ai has been collecting leaves for the past few years now to send to our collaborators at Purdue University. When I joined his lab last summer, and there was finally an extra set of hands, we began weeklong trips to find trees based on iNaturalist, a great citizen science app.
The duo uses a combination of tools to identify and catalog trees, including some they make themselves. (Illustration by Johnny Utterback, University Communications)
The problem is a lot of the butternut locations on the app were outdated or misidentified. So, he posted a callout on the Blandy website to encourage people to reach out if they knew of any tree locations or were open to searching with us.
Some people are sampling trees from their property or their neighbor’s property and sending us photos, as well as mailing us the leaf samples that we need. Other people have butternuts near them, but can’t collect samples themselves because of injuries, or the trees are too large to reach the canopy to collect leaves. So, we’ll come in with this tool called a tree slingshot to bring leaves down. They can either come assist us or just show us where the trees are.
A third group of people we call “surveyors” will receive a map of all places we either have confirmed or suspected butternut locations, and they will send us photos from there so we can confirm before going there ourselves with permits to collect the leaves.
Q. If folks want to get involved, how do they reach out?
A. They can email us at uvabutternuts@virginia.edu.
Q. Does your research have broader implications?
A. In terms of conservation, it’s helpful to have a more complete understanding of what’s happening here. Even if Virginia has the same disease incidence as other, more severe places, we need to know the severity of butternut canker disease here. Once we begin to understand if there are wild ones that are large, relatively healthy and still reproducing, we can begin to understand possible mechanisms of natural resistance before more deliberate intervention with hybrids or genetic engineering.
Communications and Events Manager University of Virginia Blandy Experimental Farm
kye4cb@virginia.edu 540-837-1758, ext. 246
