Landscape & Irrigation

www.landscapeirrigation.com Landscape and Irrigation July/August 2016 25 ■ BY BRANDON M. GALLAGHER WATSON Best Management Practice guides (BMPs) are put out by nearly every industry to establish a consistent set of actions that become the professional standard. In the world of tree care, the standards are put out by the International Society of Arboriculture (ISA), and cover most of the major topics of our trade. Tree pruning, fertilization, managing trees during construction — even lightning protection systems — all have official BMPs available. Up until now, tree injection (the process of delivering treatments directly into the vascular systems of trees) has had no industry standard guidelines. Every "How-to" available was coming solely from the makers of the various injection devices, leading to some inconsistent, contradictory, or even downright ineffective management techniques. Shawn Bernick, MS, the former director of research and current chief operating officer for Rainbow Treecare Scientific Advancements, and Dr. E. Thomas Smiley, plant pathologist and soil scientist with the Bartlett Tree Research Laboratories, were requested to co-author the ISA's Tree Injection BMP. I recently sat down with them to discuss the origins and the importance of putting this guide together. Q: What purpose did you see this guide serving? Bernick: The intentions of the BMP were that, regardless of the device or tree injection equipment that you were using as an applicator, there are some common recommendations that will minimize any adverse affects of tree injection but will also help in the performance of the different products that are being applied out there. That was one impetus for it, and there were companies out there making recommendations about how it should be done, and there was not consensus among industry and scientists on that. There was confusion for technicians on how to do this, so we were trying to create some consistency and common ground where we could. Smiley: We do focus on those generalities of where, when, and how to apply because those are some of the common issues we see in the industry. We see people trying to inject into tree trunks when they should be doing root flares — that's a major one. We get a lot of questions about what time of day materials go up more quickly, so we tried to answer those common questions and point people in the right direction for doing tree injection. Q: How did this Tree Injection BMP come about? Smiley: This one came to us from the industry — specifically from Joel Spies at Rainbow — and I think his motivation here was seeing a lot of poor-quality tree injections, either ones that damaged trees or didn't do what they were supposed to do, and he wanted to bring up the quality of the entire industry. And that's one of the things that best management practices do, by providing information that is necessary or is useful to working arborists to guide how they do work. So, Joel really starting driving this, and started working with other manufacturers, and got all the major manufacturers on the team for writing and review. Bernick: If I could add to that too, I think with the upsurge in tree injections over the last decade or so, going back to the early 2000s — with invasive species like hemlock woolly adelgid, emerald ash borer, and Asian longhorn beetle — there has been a lot of emphasis on the use of tree injection as one of the methods for managing those key pests. Over the last couple of years there have been a number of industry workshops focused on tree injection that have also increased the awareness and knowledge — and identified some of the missings as it related to tree injection — and one of those missings was to have a BMP that could give consistency and some guidance so everyone could get on the same page. Q: What kind of peer-reviewed, published research were you able to pull from for this guide? Smiley: There is certainly a lot of product-based research out there showing that this material works on this pest. There are a number of studies that date back to the Dutch elm disease years — in the '70s and '80s — that cover some of these more general topics; Setting the Standard The authors of the newly published Tree Injection Best Management Practices guide discuss its importance PHOTO PROVIDED BY RAINBOW TREECARE SCIENTIFIC ADVANCEMENTS TREE CARE

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