It was a busy morning at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Bronx Zoo.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Not only taking care of animals, but of the trees.<\/p>\n
Crews from the zoo and the New York Restoration Project planted 20 hybrid American chestnut trees along the banks of the Bronx River and other locations.<\/p>\n
It’s the same place where more than 120 years ago a forester named Hermann Merkel documented the chestnut blight that would destroy 4 billion American chestnut trees.<\/p>\n
“It’s really fitting, I think, to come full circle and plant these hybrid chestnuts that are hopefully going to be resistant to the blight, here at the Bronx Zoo where the blight was first identified,” Craig Piper, the interim director at the zoo, said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The hope is the saplings will one day look like the ones growing in Highbridge Park in Northern Manhattan, where the New York Restoration Project, also known as NYRP, planted them in 2017.<\/p>\n
Last year, the NYRP launched its 1,000 Chestnut Campaign to expand restoration and engage New Yorkers in planting and monitoring the trees.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Next year, we will be planting over 500 trees around the city. And our goal for this challenge is to get 1,000 trees that are over 10 feet tall, which we think will be a really meaningful milestone towards bringing the species back,” Jason Smith, the director of Northern Manhattan Parks for the New York Restoration Project, said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The American chestnut can be more than 100 feet tall and 10 feet wide, giants of the forest that have really not been seen around these parts in a long time.<\/p>\n
Retired environmental engineer Bart Chezar has been an advocate for planting American chestnuts for more than 20 years, planting hybrid chestnuts in Prospect Park and Green-Wood Cemetery with volunteers in Brooklyn.<\/p>\n
“The role we’re playing here is more educational, to show we can grow the trees, to support these efforts and to show that, you know, they can be successful,” Chezar said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Piper said this is all part of an ongoing research and conservation program.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“We will work in partnership with the New York Restoration Project to monitor the health of the trees, to help sustain them and conduct research on you know what planting locations seem to work well, does this hybrid seem to work well,” Piper said.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was a busy morning at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Bronx Zoo.\u00a0 Not only taking care of animals,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":373741,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[2296,25,128,231,9,24,12,63,2297,129,131,130,27,200],"class_list":["post-373740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-the-bronx","tag-app-human-interest","tag-app-top-stories","tag-bronx","tag-human-interest","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-news","tag-nyc","tag-roger-clark","tag-the-bronx","tag-the-bronx-headlines","tag-the-bronx-news","tag-top-stories","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373740\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/373741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}