Approximately 70 million ash trees populate Iowa’s woodlands and urban areas, with more than 1,200 on Iowa State’s campus. All of them are being threatened by a population of tiny green beetles that has already swept through several nearby states.

Mark Vitosh, district forester for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, said the problematic beetle, known as the emerald ash borer, appears to attack all types of ash trees, which means all of Iowa’s ash trees are at risk.

Mark Shour, ISU Extension pest management and environment program specialist, said that if the ash borer did infest the ash trees on campus, dealing with the problem would be very expensive and dangerous.

According to an informational document from Shour, the beetle has been found in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Maryland. Shour said the beetle has not been found in Iowa yet, and the nearest infested place is Peoria, Ill.

“We’ve done a lot of education to try to make people aware [of the insect],” Vitosh said of the Iowa DNR’s efforts, which have been made in conjunction with Iowa State and the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has also been addressing the ash borer problem.

Vitosh said Shour has been “on the front lines” in trying to trap the ash borer beetle. He said Shour has helped the DNR make sure many sick and dying ash trees have been examined for the beetle’s presence.

In another effort to try to locate the beetle, Shour said several sticky purple traps have been set in ash trees, because the beetles are attracted to the color purple. Several trees have also been “stressed” intentionally, weakening them and making them more susceptible to attack. Despite all these efforts, Shour said the beetle has not yet been found in Iowa.

“If we can find small numbers of this insect, hopefully we can eliminate that little population in that place,” Shour said.

He said eliminating the population would have to be done by actually cutting down the trees in the infested area.

Trees outside the area would be treated with a preventive insecticide, which would be injected into the tree so that other insect or bird populations would not be affected.

The Ames facility, affiliated with Iowa State, is currently gathering seeds of different ash species in order to salvage genetic material.

“What we’re trying to do is conserve genetic information of the trees,” said Jeffrey Carstens, research technician for the North Central Regional Plant Introduction Station, a U.S. Department of Agriculture unit affiliated with Iowa State.

Carstens said no resistant ash species have been identified in the U.S. yet, but researchers are looking to Asian species of the tree to find resistance.

He said that, even though Asian species that have grown in the same area with the pest may have “some levels of resistance” to the ash borer, the Asian trees are not necessarily resistant.

The Asian trees may help replace stricken U.S. trees, Carstens said, but bringing in foreign trees will not solve the problem of conserving U.S. trees.

“Ash trees have been growing in North America for who knows how many years,” he said.

The NCRPIS comes into play in this national problem because it conserves and distributes different types of seeds. Carstens said his job has been to go to different states and collect seeds of different types of ash trees.

He said the U.S. green ash and white ash trees make up a good portion of Iowa’s forests. If the emerald ash borer does wipe out all the ash trees in the country some day in the future, gene banks such as the NCRPIS can help save enough genetic material to eventually introduce the trees into their once-native areas once the pest has been controlled, Carstens said.

“We realize this [insect] is coming,” Carstens said. “We realize there’s nothing we can concurrently do about it, so we’re trying to collect as much genetics as possible.”