Chapter 12: Monitoring the Health of Pinus strobiformis:Early Impacts of White Pine Blister Rust Invasion (Project INT-EM-B-10-03)

Abstract

Southwestern white pine (Pinus strobiformis, abbr. PIST), a tree native to Arizona, New Mexico, and western Texas in the U.S. Southwest (Little 1971), is threatened by a potentially lethal invasive fungal pathogen, Cronartium ribicola (white pine blister rust, abbr. WPBR) (Conklin and others 2009). Researchers detected the disease around 1990 in New Mexico’s Sacramento Mountains (Hawksworth 1990), where it has since infected as much as 40 percent of the PIST population and inflicted increasing mortality (Conklin and others 2009). By 2004, WPBR was observed in PIST in New Mexico’s Gila Mountains, and in 2009, researchers identified the first infected trees on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation in the White Mountains of Arizona (Fairweather and Geils 2011).

Parent Publication

• Forest health monitoring: national status, trends, and analysis 2013

Citation

Looney, Christopher E.; Waring, Kristen M.; Fairweather, Mary Lou. 2013. Chapter 12: Monitoring the Health of Pinus strobiformis:Early Impacts of White Pine Blister Rust Invasion (Project INT-EM-B-10-03). General Technical Report SRS 207. USDA-Forest Service, Southern Research Station. 9 p.