Understanding the how and why of brown spot needle blight remains the primary focus for researchers in Arkansas and the wider region, Blazier said. That’s where Zurqani’s work comes in.
“If we were able to identify the early stages of the disease, we can somehow get a clue about what’s going to happen in the future,” Zurqani said.
In Arkansas, Blazier said the fight against pine decline has been highly collaborative. The Forestry Division of the Arkansas Department of Agriculture and the Arkansas Forestry Association have been working closely with the Arkansas Forest Resources Center, which conducts research and extension activities through the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station and the Cooperative Extension Service, the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture’s research and outreach arms.
“We have a tight working relationship between all of those agencies,” Blazier said. “There’s been excellent communication between the university, extension service, forestry association and the state’s forestry division.”
Regional challenge
In August 2023, Blazier attended a meeting at Auburn University to discuss the needle blight phenomenon with researchers and industry stakeholders from across the southern U.S.
According to information from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service, brown spot needle blight has been confirmed in nine states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. Severe damage, however, has so far been limited to Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
The meeting was organized by Lori Eckhardt, professor and director of Auburn University’s Forest Health Cooperative.
“I organized this meeting to bring together industry, government, academia and private landowners to create a space in which attendees can discuss questions, brainstorm ideas, identify problems and make decisions and develop solutions pertaining to brown spot needle blight,” Eckhardt said.
“Collaboration is important between the researchers and the landowners,” she said. “The day-to-day managers in the field can share knowledge that assists us as researchers in asking good questions to design studies that better help us understand and manage the disease. Working together will help us find answers sooner.”
Collaboration leads to clues
Blazier said the Auburn meeting provided an opportunity for participants to share what actions each affected state is taking on the research side to understand what’s causing the problem.
“One of the things that was shared at the Auburn meeting was some anecdotal evidence from the forest industry showing that there may be a soil nutrient facet to this,” Blazier said. “And that's actually something that we are looking into further within the Arkansas Forest Resources Center.”
Researchers have been collecting samples this winter from stands of trees affected by pine decline and analyzing nutrient levels. If a nutrient deficiency is found to contribute to pine decline, Blazier said that targeted soil fertilization might be a way to fight the disease.
“And that would actually give us another tool,” he said.
Looking to the future
As the winter dormant season ends and the life cycles of fungal diseases pick up again, Blazier said that testing for pine decline will continue next month.
“We’re going to resume testing on a monthly basis as a group in February, and we’ll continue that all the way through the growing season,” he said. That information will continue to feed into Zurqani’s research efforts using geospatial AI.
Blazier sees hope for spatial analysis and machine learning tools to help researchers identify patterns in the data and get to the bottom of pine decline.
“We're really optimistic,” he said.
To learn more about Division of Agriculture research, visit the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station website: https://aaes.uada.edu/. Follow us on Twitter at @ArkAgResearch. To learn about extension programs in Arkansas, contact your local Cooperative Extension Service agent or visit www.uaex.uada.edu. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @AR_Extension. To learn more about the Division of Agriculture, visit https://uada.edu/. Follow us on Twitter at @AgInArk.
