Action for Ash

Citizen science highlight: Beating the Emerald Ash Borer

I’m building a thesis around resilient systems, biodiversity, and community. There is something meaningful around community citizen science projects - both as a way to strengthen ecosystem resilience as well as to strengthen the human capacity for collective action. As such, I’m trying to learn from as many citizen science projects as possible. My first foray into one of these projects was an action day for ash trees in the Northeast.

Action for Ash

On Tuesday, I drove up to Colby College to attend a field workshop hosted by the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI), Ecological Research Institute (ERI), and the Ash Protection Collaboration Across Waponahkik (APCAW). The focus: how to contribute to a growing collaborative effort to monitor and preserve ash trees in the face of emerald ash borer (EAB) invasion. Here are five key takeaways:

1. Ash is more than a tree; it’s a cultural keystone.
   Black ash supports biodiversity, stores carbon, and is central to Indigenous craft, story, and stewardship. Its loss would be an ecological, cultural, and spiritual tragedy.

2. Not all hope is lost.
   Though EAB has killed hundreds of millions of ash trees across North America, there are survivors. In areas where 95–99% of ash have died, a few trees persist—these are known as “lingering ash.” They may carry genetic resistance or other adaptive traits, and researchers are now identifying, tagging, and propagating them to form the foundation of a resilient future population.

3. People can be the solution.
   Wabanaki foresters, academic researchers, and conservation nonprofits are partnering on seed banking, cloning, selective tree conservation and breeding efforts to bolster and preserve resilient ash’s genetic diversity and speed the evolutionary process of developing EAB resistance. Their work not only supports forest health but protects the cultural heritage of Wabanaki basketmakers, for whom black ash (Fraxinus nigra) is an irreplaceable resource.

4. Citizen science is powerful and essential.
   Volunteers can play a vital role in reporting ash tree health, identifying early signs of EAB damage (like canopy thinning and D-shaped exit holes), and collecting seeds from lingering ash for conservation. The more eyes on the ground, the better our chances of finding lingering ash before they’re gone.

5. People are also the problem.
   EAB is often spread unintentionally through the movement of firewood or construction materials. It first attacks stressed trees but eventually overcomes even the healthiest ones. Ironically, our fieldwork took place beside a new parking lot recently constructed by Colby, fragmenting nearby forest and placing further pressure on a fragile ecosystem.

Get involved.
You can be a citizen scientist too! Download the app Anecdata to join one of four research projects hosted by ERI. Talk to your town about how they handle EAB and nudge them to support scientific collaborations instead of preemptively removing ash trees. And above all, don’t move firewood. Small actions can help save a species.