The American Chestnut Foundation

The American Chestnut Foundation (TACF) is a nonprofit American organization dedicated to breeding a blight-resistant American chestnut (Castanea dentata) tree and the reintroduction of this tree to the forests of the Eastern United States.

The mission of The American Chestnut Foundation (TACF) is to restore the American chestnut tree to the forests of Eastern North America by breeding genetically diverse blight-resistant trees, evaluating various approaches to the management of chestnut pests and pathogens, and reintroducing the trees into the forest in an ecologically acceptable manner. The American chestnut tree once comprised a quarter of the eastern hardwood forest from Maine to Georgia and west to the Ohio River Valley, providing a valuable economic resource in both timber and nuts, as well as an abundant food source for wildlife. An accidentally imported Asiatic chestnut blight decimated approximately four billion trees, with devastating results to Appalachian communities and economies.

American chestnut

The American chestnut (Castanea dentata) is a large, monoecious deciduous tree of the beech family native to eastern North America. Before the species was devastated by the chestnut blight, a fungal disease, it was one of the most important forest trees throughout its range, and was considered the finest chestnut tree in the world. It is estimated that between 3 and 4 billion American chestnut trees were destroyed in the first half of the 20th century by blight after its initial discovery in 1904. Very few mature specimens of the tree exist within its historical range, although many small shoots of the former live trees remain. There are hundreds of large (2 to 5 ft diameter) American chestnuts outside its historical range, some in areas where less virulent strains of the pathogen are more common, such as the 600 to 800 large trees in northern Lower Michigan.

Description

Castanea dentata is a rapidly growing deciduous hardwood tree, historically reaching up to 30 metres (98 ft) in height, and 3 metres (9.8 ft) in diameter. It ranged from Maine and southern Ontario to Mississippi, and from the Atlantic coast to the Appalachian Mountains and the Ohio Valley. It has several related chestnut species, such as the European sweet chestnut, Chinese chestnut, and Japanese chestnut, which are distinguishable from the American species by a few morphological traits, such as leaf shape, petiole length and nut size. C. dentata was once one of the most common trees in the Northeastern United States. In Pennsylvania alone, it is estimated to have comprised 25–30% of all hardwoods. The tree's huge population was due to a combination of rapid growth and a large annual seed crop in comparison to oaks which do not reliably produce sizable numbers of acorns every year. Nut production begins when C. dentata is 7–8 years old.