Inedible Fruit as Food for Thought This Arbor Day

This post was supposed to be for Earth Day on Monday (April 22).  But a weekend of fishing and gardening prevented me from writing it prior to Monday, and my day job prevented me from writing it on Monday.  Fortunately, I have a chance at redemption, because Arbor Day is on Friday, April 26.  And this piece really is more appropriate for Arbor Day than Earth Day.

Hopefully lots of trees will be planted all around the country this weekend in observation of Arbor Day.  What kind of trees?  I hope everyone considers planting trees native to their own area, because natives are already suited to the climate and typically offer some degree of benefit to wildlife.  But really, the better question to ask is:  What kind of trees should we NOT plant. I’m glad you asked.

Throughout the eastern the United States, you can easily spot Callery pear (Pyrus calleryana) trees this time of year.  Here in the mid-Atlantic states, they are now just starting to go from their full, brilliant-white bloom to leafing out.  Look for trees with upward spreading branches that are entirely in bloom in white, and you’ll probably find Callery pear trees.  In autumn, their leaves turn various pleasant shades of red.  Sounds like a really nice tree, right?  Maybe too much of a good thing.

Many communities have allowed and even encouraged Callery pear cultivars to be planted as street trees.  Planting a monoculture of any one tree species is bad, because a species-specific blight could wipe out entire neighborhoods of those trees in just a couple of years.

The Callery pear tree is native to Vietnam and China. First introduced to the United States in the early 20^th century for experimentation to develop blight resistance in the common pear, the Callery did not become popular ornamentally until the 1950s.  As its ornamental value grew, various cultivated varieties were developed.  Probably the most popular cultivar of the past 50 years has been the Bradford pear.

Cultivars in the U.S. originated from China and are different genotypes. Some genotypes require cross-pollination from another genotype to set seed, but others can self-pollinate. Different genotypes growing within about 300 feet of each other can cross-pollinate and produce fruit with viable seeds. The Bradford pear cultivar is one of several varieties of Callery pear that are capable of spreading and being invasive.

The fruits of Callerys and their cultivars are not edible by humans, being only about one centimeter in diameter.  But birds readily eat these small fruits and disperse the seeds in their droppings, and fertile seeds will establish anywhere they are dropped.  Seeds that germinate can grow rapidly in disturbed soils such as along roadsides and the margins of cultivated fields and woodlots. The plants that spread in natural areas are not true cultivars. They are sexually reproducing populations consisting of multiple genotypes that recombine every generation to produce more viable seed and perpetuate the invasion of this non-native pear tree.

Callery pear cultivars that have formed a thick patch in a former

cultivated field.


Once established, Callery pear trees can form dense thickets that push out native trees that cannot tolerate the Callery’s shade or compete with them for water, soil, and space.  A single Callery or fertile cultivar can spread quickly via seed suckers and form a formidable patch in less than 10 years.  Its success as an invasive species is aided by a general lack of natural controls like insects and diseases.  Callery pear trees are reported to have escaped cultivation and are out-competing native trees in at least 25 states.

Identification

•    Size:  mature height is 30-50 ft. tall and 20-30 ft. wide; young trees may be thorny.

•    Leaves: deciduous, alternate, simple, broad-ovate to ovate, 1½-3 in. long; shiny dark green and leathery, small round-toothed margins; scarlet, mahogany, purple hues in fall.

•    Flowers, fruits and seeds: flowers in early spring before the leaves, white with five petals, about 1 in. across; fruits mature in fall and are small, hard, brown, and almost woody.

•    Spreads: by seeds that are dispersed to new locations by birds that eat the fruits.

Control


Simply do not plant the Callery pear or any of its cultivars such as the Bradford.  Lobby your municipal planning commission to prohibit Callery pear cultivars from inclusion in land development plans.

Cut down medium or large trees and treat their stumps with a systemic herbicide like glyphosate (better known as Roundup).  If you find them coming up in your yard or even in the wild, you can simply pull the seedlings and shallow-rooted saplings when the soil is moist. 

If you succeed in pulling the seedlings or small trees out of the ground, remember that these trees and other invasive plants will take advantage of any disturbed soils to germinate their seeds.  So instead of leaving a patch of disturbed soil to germinate new invasive plant seeds, consider having some sort of native plant(s) ready to immediately plant in place of the former pear invader.

Callery pears that have escaped cultivation (meaning they probably sprouted from seeds disbursed by birds).  These trees are on the edge of a former cultivated field.

 Native Alternatives


There are several native trees that are excellent substitutes for Callery pears.  They include: serviceberry (Amelanchier species), hawthorne (Crataegus sp.), redbud (Cercis canadensis), Dogwood (Cornus florida) and crabapple (Malus coronaria).

Bottom line is this -- by all means, go out and plant several trees this weekend to celebrate Arbor Day.  Just select your trees with regard to the environment.  Natives are all-around winning selections.  But if you go with a non-native cultivar, please do your homework to make sure you are not buying a cultivar that is likely to “escape cultivation.”  Happy planting!

Stormwater Runoff - The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

OK, with a title like that, you might think I would actually quote that classic spaghetti western.  But no.  I'll open with a quote from a different classic flick.

“Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.”  That’s what Travis Bickle, the Taxi Driver, said in the 1976 Martin Scorsese movie of the same name. Bickle, played by Robert DeNiro, was referring to vigilante justice as the rain and some of New York City’s shadiest characters as the scum that would be washed away.

photo by the author

But this post isn’t about violence or criminals.  It’s about the inanimate scum that gets washed from streets, sidewalks, and everywhere by actual rain storms.  You can call it stormwater, runoff, or the more technical “overland flow.”  But the effect is the same.  Trash, sediment, and chemicals get washed from the land’s surface into the nearest body of surface water.  Even in the absence of trash and chemicals, many streams become degraded by sediment washing off of sparsely vegetated areas and by stormwater that gets heated up by washing over hot asphalt surfaces during summer thunderstorms (trout cannot tolerate warm water).

I read a post this weekend on the American Rivers blog about some big strides that the city of Atlanta is taking to make their stormwater infrastructure greener and thereby easing the effects of urban runoff on the rivers and streams that receive their stormwater.  Atlanta recently updated their stormwater ordinances to encourage implementing green infrastructure, recognizing that,

“The use of green infrastructure and runoff reduction practices improves water quality in our streams and reduces the magnitude and frequency of flooding and combined sewer overflow events through the infiltration, evapotranspiration, and reuse of stormwater runoff…”

The City of Philadelphia has been proactive with its stormwater management for a number of years.  The Philadelphia Water Department is in charge of managing the stormwater runoff and has a system in place to charge property owners based on the volume of stormwater they discharge to the city’s storm sewer system.  Philadelphia is approaching the runoff problem the right way by getting property owners to pay for their stormwater runoff in proportion to the volume they discharge.  Therefore, a 30-year old big-box store surrounded by a sea of asphalt does not get away with discharging their stormwater, untreated, to the city stormwater system.  They pay.  So they have an incentive to treat as much of their stormwater on-site as they can.

Little Lehigh Creek. Sedimentation and elevated temperatures are the most significant stressors in this segment of this spring-fed stream (photo by the author).

Ironically, many U.S. cities understand the big picture of stormwater management better than some medium-sized municipalities that still have delusions of being a semi-rural bedroom communities as opposed to the suburban wastelands they are allowing  themselves to become. With increasing suburbanization and urbanization, the stormwater runoff problems become more acute.  EPA regulations governing Municipal Separate Storm Sewer Systems (abbreviated as MS4) are requiring municipalities to take responsibility for the stormwater that their storm sewer systems discharge into surface water bodies.  And here in Pennsylvania, our Department of Environmental Protection’s newer stormwater regulations are requiring new construction projects to manage their stormwater on site using either old-fashioned, ugly retention basins or, preferably, naturalized stormwaterbasins, pervious pavement, or other green infrastructure.

photo credit: LowerMacungiePatch.com

In my township, however, we still have voluminous problems with the stormwater runoff from all of the recklessly approved new construction from the early 1990s up through the middle of the last decade.  We have serious, recurring flooding problems because of the stormwater runoff entering the stream that runs the length of our township – stormwater coming from a Walmart shopping center with inadequate on-site stormwater management facilities, and stormwater coming from hundreds upon hundreds of acres of warehouse facilities built in a neighboring township.

photo credit: LowerMacungiePatch.com

I’m sure my local stormwater runoff problem is also happening in many other municipalities that have experienced unchecked suburbanization in the past 20-30 years.  This problem cannot be solved by simply requiring all future development to manage its stormwater on-site. It’s time to make all property owners pay for the burden of their stormwater on the public.  Stormwater runoff should be managed by a municipal authority in the same manner that sanitary sewer services are managed.  Pennsylvania’s municipal code allows for creation of a municipal authority to manage a utility, and stormwater management is a utility that has been ignored for too long in many areas.  Unlike sanitary sewer service, which can be apportioned based on political subdivision boundaries, however, stormwater management authorities would function more practically if they are based on watershed boundaries.  All dischargers should pay their fair share to manage their runoff so that it does not exacerbate flooding or impair water quality in the receiving streams.

There should be no free lunch when it comes to discharging large volumes of stormwater that can cause localized flooding and seriously impair high-quality streams.

PA Is All Fracked Up

I want to thank two of my friends, Mark and Dana, for each posting this graphic (below) on their Facebook pages last week.  Because it got me thinking that I haven’t commented for a while on Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale natural gas boom that has entirely changed the landscape of much of the northern tier of the state, wrapping down along the Allegheny Plateau through southwestern PA and on into West Virginia. 

Drilling site in Dimmock, PA, with dozens of portable fractionation tanks lined

up to contain drilling waste water. (photo credit: http://www.theithacajournal.com)

 As a geologist, I have nothing against responsible development of Pennsylvania's energy resources.  I understand how and why the hydraulic fracturing process works.  I understand all of the settling lagoons and fractionation tanks that are needed to contain all of the wastewater before it’s taken somewhere for treatment or reinjected to drill the next well.  I understand all of the service roads to remote well pads that must be cleared and built just to get the equipment and materials to a new well pad location.

I also understand what can go wrong in the process.  When you have drillers and other subcontractors coming here to Pennsylvania from out of state to build well pads and wastewater lagoons and to drill a series of wells over 10,000 feet deep at each well pad, and when you have gas companies pushing their subcontractors to do more and do it faster, you are bound to get thousands of violations.  Realistically though, these 3,025 violations are only the ones that inspectors from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection actually see evidence of and write up.  So, unfortunately, there could be a few hundred or a few thousand more violations that have taken place but were not documented.

These data were compiled by NPR StateImpact, which is a collaboration of National Public Radio reporters and local reporters who cover the fiscal and environmental impact of Pennsylvania’s booming energy economy, focusing on Marcellus Shale drilling.  They acquired lists of violations from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, the state agency in charge of regulating natural gas drilling in PA.  The article in which these data were first published explains that these 3,025 violations were documented on 8,982 active gas wells from January 2009 until June 2012.  That’s three and a half years, with two and one-third violations per day.  

Gas companies would quickly point out that tens of thousands of horizontal wells have been drilled in the Marcellus Shale in the past five years, so the wells with violations (might) account for some small percentage of the total wells.  But to me, that's a carpetbagger rationalization for carelessness.  No violation is acceptable.  The PADEP should hold the gas companies to a higher standard.  Pennsylvania is the only natural gas producing state in the country that does not charge gas companies a severance tax based on the value of gas they produce and send to market.  If the PA state legislature and Gov. Corbett don't have the backbone to stand up to the gas companies and implement a severance tax like every other gas producing state has in place, Pennsylvania residents should get something in return.  And that something could be the most stringent enforcement of environmental regulations in the U.S.

Tanker full of drilling wastewater (frack water) that ran off the road in West Virginia.

(photo credit: West Virginia Sierra Club)

There is no minimum number of violations that are acceptable.  This is not a basketball game where you're allowed five fouls.  But maybe it should be.  But maybe gas companies with more than five violations should lose their right to continue to produce a gas well.  As soon as one gas company fouls out and gets sent back to Texas, maybe the remaining gas companies would take notice and be more careful.

Drilling issues are not limited to Pennsylvania and West Virginia.  The drill rig shown in this photo is near the town of Pinedale, WY. I once camped on U.S. Forest Service land next to Fremont Lake outside of Pinedale for a week. One or two of those nights I slept out under the stars with no sounds other than the crickets and no lights other than the moon and stars.  These drill rigs run loudly 24/7 and use flood lights at night. So even if no regulatory violations occur, there is still a loss of tranquility for anyone within earshot of drilling operations. (photo credit: Abrahm Lustgarten on http://www.propublica.orgpinedale)