URI_Research_Magazine_Momentum_Spring_2016_Melissa-McCarthy

“Eastern hemlock is the only native shade-tolerant conifer on the East Coast. Because of that, it plays an incredibly important role in creating habitats for a series of organisms that like cooler or moister microclimates and for shading headwater streams — in areas where trout breed.”

- Evan Preisser

from which Preisser and colleagues took cuttings, cultivated them into trees, and spent four years testing them for resistance to adelgids, yielding positive results. Fewer adelgids settled on these trees, and more insects died, likely thanks to the trees exuding more terpenes (the chemicals that give pine trees their “piney” scent). With such success, Preisser and his colleagues have started to plant these cuttings to test how they will fare in the wild. “We recently put out about a hundred of our rooted cuttings of resistant trees along with susceptible trees at seven or eight different field sites in six different states on the eastern seaboard,” says Preisser. “And if those field trials work, then we will go to mass replantings.” These early results mean that Preisser may save the eastern hemlock along with the many species it supports. Funding for Preisser’s work has come from several sources: two National Science Foundation grants, one for $500,000 for three years to URI and another for $586,000 for three years to URI and Tufts University; a three-year $430,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture grant to URI

and collaborators at Harvard University, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the Forest Service; a three- year $110,000 grant from the Rhode Island Agricultural Experiment Station, and a one-year $10,000 grant from the U.S. Forest Service.

Preisser and his colleagues have started to plant these cuttings to test how they will fare in the wild.

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Spring | 2016 Page 39