Frank Betlejewski stands ankle-deep in the upper fork of Silver Creek, pointing at four- and five-inch rainbow trout hovering in the shade under log jams intentionally created for habitat. Bronze and dead-brown Port Orford cedar hug the banks of the small creek as it weaves and tumbles through the rugged expanse of southern Oregon’s Siskiyou Mountains and into the jagged canyons of the Illinois River.

At first glance, the cedars look like they could be victims of the Biscuit Fire, but they stand in green islands of streamside vegetation that tell a different story. Before this northern finger of the half-million-acre fire burned, a devastating root disease, Phytophthora lateralis, swept down the drainage. The pathogen, easily spread and usually fatal to Port Orford cedars, has left landscapes like this drainage spotted with dead and dying trees.

The threat to Port Orford cedar, one of the most economically and ecologically valuable trees in the Northwest, has warranted an accelerated selective breeding program in southwestern Oregon and northwestern California. The U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and other agencies are using the selective breeding program to augment their regime of damage control techniques in hopes of creating a new generation of trees better able to withstand the disease.

Betlejewski, the Rogue River National Forest’s Port Orford cedar program manager, is measuring the diameter of trees in various plots along the stream, recording differences in canopy cover and growth with graduate student Angel Saavedra. Betlejewski, armed against the mosquitoes with a bottle of Port Orford cedarÐderived bug repellent, wears faded blue jeans tucked into a designated pair of rubber boots that he wears only when he is working in infested areas. He explains that clean vehicles and equipment are essential management techniques for preventing the spread of the disease. Once an area becomes infested, it is nearly impossible to eradicate the pathogen.

He points downstream to a dead, immature Port Orford cedar. This small tree, once a surprisingly resistant specimen, succumbed to the disease after the Biscuit Fire battered its defenses. It had proven to be more resistant to the pathogen than Cold Frame 1, the tree against which other trees are measured for resistance in the selective breeding program.

Cold Frame 1, growing outside of the greenhouses at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon, is a resilient tree. Halfway up the trunk it splits into forks. It has been pruned and topped multiple times to prevent it from shading out other trees on the site, and it enjoys healthy growth in an environment that only a select few other Port Orford cedar would be able to withstand—an environment teeming with P. lateralis.

In the early 1980s scientists from Oregon State dug up nearly a thousand wild Port Orford cedar seedlings growing on road cuts near Coos Bay, Oregon, and transplanted them to experimental beds on the Corvallis campus. Their goal was to increase the amount of inoculum in the beds’ soil for studies on pathogen survival. They succeeded and were able to use the infested soil in a number of experiments. All of the trees in the beds died except for one. After a series of tests (the results were published in 1989), the surviving tree, Cold Frame 1, became the foundation for the selective breeding program.

Port Orford cedar has a limited natural range that extends along 220 miles of mist-shrouded coastal forest in northwestern California and southwestern Oregon. It thrives in areas that receive year-round seepage and along stream banks, where it provides shade and structure for fish habitat. The characteristic weeping branch tips and delicate, tapering profile of the tree usually become visible within fifty miles of the coast. Eleven different rare and sensitive plant species are found exclusively in association with Port Orford cedar.

When crushed, the waxy, scale-like leaves of Port Orford cedar give off a pleasing citrus aroma, and the wood itself has a unique lemon scent. The durable, straight-grained, blond wood is used domestically for a diverse variety of products, from arrow shafts to decks to cabinetry. In Japan, the wood is considered sacred and is used for temples, shrines, palaces and baths, although recent economic woes and cultural changes have slackened the demand for imported logs.

From the 1800s through World War II, Port Orford cedar was harvested aggressively, and by the 1960s, 60 million board feet were exported annually. During the 1990s, exports dropped from 10 million to 2 million board feet. The severity of this decline was somewhat balanced by domestic processing, which rose from 2.5 to 6.5 million board feet.

The fungi-like pathogen, P. lateralis, was named and discovered in Oregon’s Willamette Valley in 1942, after having been first reported in 1923 on ornamentals in northwest Washington. In 1952, P. lateralis was found on trees in southwestern Oregon and by 1954, a conspicuously high number of dead and dying trees drew concern. The pathogen was living up to its name—Phytophthora literally means “plant killer.”

By 1972, the disease was spreading at such an alarming rate that a Forest Service pest management report maintained that the production of Port Orford cedar “will likely decline and ultimately drop to nearly nothing as the remaining merchantable trees die or are harvested.”

The epidemic in the Northwest is closely correlated with human activity. Disease occurs at the lowest intensity in the least-accessible sites. Spore-infested soil transported by vehicles, road machinery, logging equipment and infected seedlings—and tracked in by people and animals—is responsible for its spread into uninfected areas during the wet seasons. The spores are dispersed in water, so any waterways or wet areas downslope from a road are susceptible.

Large Port Orford cedars, once infected, wither and perish over a period of one to four years. Saplings and seedlings can succumb to the disease in as little as two weeks. The pathogen leaves a signature cinnamon-colored lesion staining the inner bark at the base of the tree as it colonizes the root system and main stem.

The spread of P. lateralis has been associated in the past with timber harvesting operations. Now that the disease is better understood, precautions are taken. Harvesting in the dry season, sequencing operations from uninfested areas to infested areas and routing roads to minimize the risk of spread have become routine procedures.

Near the town of Williams, Oregon, the BLM, after public suggestion, closed five miles of road adjacent to lands infested with the pathogen. The closure has so far succeeded in preventing the disease from spreading into the area, explains Betlejewski, but permanent road closures are usually controversial.

Temporarily closing roads on federal lands during the rainy season has had positive results, but the Forest Service and the BLM have problems when gates are removed or damaged. Roadside sanitation, which involves killing diseased trees along roadways, has been unpopular with some segments of the public, and although it is not as effective as road closures, it has been widely practiced.

The data that Betlejewski is collecting from the plots along Silver Creek will be used to determine the effects of fire on the pathogen. It has been established that the pathogen is adversely affected by temperatures above 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Fire could be prescribed in the future to control the spread of the disease in addition to the preventive measures already in place, but these strategies alone might not be enough to ensure the fitness of Port Orford cedar.

The pressure from commercial harvest, the ravages of the disease and the high monetary value of Port Orford cedar have drawn attention to its future. In addition, the cooperative nature of the breeding program has accelerated its progress.

Oregon State University and the Dorena Tree Improvement Center, a Forest Service technical development station, have been working for years in conjunction with one another to select the trees with the best resistance.

Richard Sniezko, the head geneticist and acting manager of the center, says that Port Orford cedar is a very diverse species, whereas P. lateralis has a low genetic diversity, stacking the deck in favor of the breeding program. Low genetic diversity limits the ability of any organism to adapt to environmental changes, whereas high genetic diversity increases the likelihood of fitness and survival.

Inside the greenhouses next to Cold Frame 1, plant pathologists meticulously test collections from parent trees—designated healthy trees within infested areas in Oregon and California that show potential signs of resistance. Six cuttings from each tree are labeled, shuffled and dipped into a glass mason jar filled with P. lateralis, the inoculum.

After two full days they are removed and monitored for signs of infection. The outer bark is scraped away and if the parent tree is susceptible to the pathogen the unmistakable lesion appears. The 10 percent of cuttings with the smallest lesions are then rooted, and later sent back to the Oregon State lab for a root dip test, done in the same way as the preliminary stem dip test. The root dip test is measured by time until mortality instead of lesion size.

Cuttings from parent trees are collected in the wild from different breeding blocks. Elevation, soil composition and latitude and longitude all determine genetic variation within the breeding blocks. Further distinctions are made with a combination of DNA technology and adaptive response observation so that adaptive trait patterns of different regions can be preserved in the future.

Port Orford cedar can be stimulated to produce flowers at an early age, and the cuttings are relatively easy to root. This helps expedite the selection process for trees that are resistant to the pathogen.

Genetic resistance to pathogens and insects is a co-evolutionary process that often leaves hosts vulnerable. That Port Orford cedar has any natural resistance at all is fortunate. This is not always the case.

Chestnut blight fungus, an East Coast pathogen, infected nearly all of the chestnut trees across the entire natural range in North America by the 1930s. By the 1950s the tree was declared threatened. The American chestnut had no natural resistance to the pathogen, so it was cross-bred with another resistant species. Because the resistant breeds are too distant from the original American chestnut, they must be backcrossed with the resistant genes until they closely resemble the original American chestnut. Then they can be reintroduced into the wild.

Sniezko says that for the chestnut, genetic engineering could achieve the same results, but the technology is not as advanced as the selective breeding programs are. The public is also much more inclined to support selective breeding.

Selective breeding has its own history—primarily in agriculture. The Port Orford cedar selective breeding program differs from the selective breeding done in the agricultural industry to manage for disease and insects. In the agricultural industry, new plants are typically introduced on a regular basis as pathogens adapt to resistance on a relatively short time scale.

Preserving genetic diversity for the long term requires a different strategy. Sniezko believes that cultivating long-term genetic diversity of Port Orford cedar will contribute to an enduring resistance and stable overall population dynamics. This approach requires him to consider a mountain of variables before introducing resistant seedlings into the wild.

“If there’s climate change in one direction or another we want them to have enough genetic variation so they can adapt to that. If there’s another insect or pathogen we also want them to be able to adapt to that. We don’t want to do a quick fix just for P. lateralis,” said Sniezko, speaking to attendees of this year’s annual Port Orford cedar technical meeting.

The technical meetings serve to streamline advances in the program and to integrate the different management agencies involved in the Port Orford cedar program. Sniezko and Betlejewski both made presentations at the meeting this year, which was held on the Hoopa Indian Reservation in northern California.

The reservation borders the Six Rivers National Forest and is surrounded by areas infested with the disease. Many tribes in the region have been using Port Orford cedar for medicinal, cultural and religious purposes since antiquity. Port Orford cedar is still an important part of life for the Hoopa and an integral part of their cultural heritage. Merv George, a Hoopa spiritual leader, led us down the road to a site along the Trinity River where the Hoopa have been holding traditional ceremonies for generations.

We gathered around an open-walled ceremonial pavilion made from Port Orford cedar. An old fire pit between the pavilion and the river was dated back 10,000 years by archaeologists, George said. He described the significance of this particular sacred site to the Hoopa and recounted, pointing into the steep mountains, how the trees used to be cut, peeled and then dragged down the mountain above the river into the valley for use.

“We need to keep the root rot away. Nobody has brought it in yet.” With a sense of pride he explained, “This is home. We’re trying to instill that in our young people. Take care of it and it will take care of you.” So far, the disease has not established itself on reservation land, quite possibly because of restricted access.

But the Hoopa will have another option if the pathogen does show up on their land. Resistant seedlings will soon be available for use on tribal and federal forest lands. Betlejewski has plans to use resistant seedlings in the Biscuit Fire Recovery Project. Re-establishing Port Orford cedar in the Biscuit Fire area will be a learning opportunity for all who are involved in managing the spread of the disease.

“The relative level of genetic variation in Port Orford cedar populations for restoration—that’s a question we’re facing. We’re interested in knowing that and the public should also be interested in that,” said Sniezko. Since 1997, 10,000 selections have been made from wild parent trees. Approximately one in ten have shown measurable resistance. That’s a lot of progress in a very short time, and Cold Frame 1 is still healthy.