“Pine trees do have leaves that change color and fall,” said Vic Ford, a forester who heads up agriculture and natural resources for the Cooperative Extension Service, the outreach arm of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture. “People forget that those needles are a pine tree’s leaves.”

Ford said Arkansans may be seeing a lot of brown needles on their trees. After a round of Labor Day storms, many of those brown needles have hit the ground.

“Usually, pine foliage falls a little later than this, but drought has accelerated the process,” he said. “Pines lose their foliage every fall but trees usually keep one or two years’ worth of needles” for photosynthesis.

“The brown foliage that was lost would have been lost later in the fall if the high winds and drought had not occurred,” Ford said.

“These needles would have turned brown in a normal year due to senescence” — essentially old age, he said. “Droughts often will cause the two-year-old needles to prematurely senesce and will have a heavier amount of needle fall.”How do you tell whether your pine tree is shedding needles abnormally? Ford said disease can also cause defoliation, “but signs and symptoms of the causal fungus will be apparent on the needles by the observation of leaf spots. Foliage diseases will cause all ages of needles to turn brown.”

Learn more through the fact sheet Pine needle diseases in Arkansas. To learn about extension programs in Arkansas, contact your local Cooperative Extension Service agent or visit www.uaex.uada.edu. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @AR_Extension. To learn more about Division of Agriculture research, visit the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station website: https://aaes.uada.edu/. Follow us on Twitter at @ArkAgResearch. To learn more about the Division of Agriculture, visit https://uada.edu/. Follow us on Twitter at @AgInArk.

About the Division of Agriculture
The University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture’s mission is to strengthen agriculture, communities, and families by connecting trusted research to the adoption of best practices. The Division of Agriculture conducts research and extension work within the nation’s historic land grant education system through the Agricultural Experiment Station and the Cooperative Extension Service.

The Division of Agriculture is one of 20 entities within the University of Arkansas System. It has offices in all 75 counties in Arkansas and faculty on five system campuses.

The University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture offers all its Extension and Research programs to all eligible persons without regard to race, color, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, age, disability, marital or veteran status, genetic information, or any other legally protected status, and is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer.

Researchers plan to use artificial intelligence and remote sensing alongside some good old-fashioned detective work to find the cause of the pine decline seen in parts of Arkansas.

The decline has taken the form of browning and dropping of needles in stands of mature pines in southeastern Arkansas. The ailment has also resulted in the deaths of some trees.

Forestry experts from the Arkansas Department of Agriculture, the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture, University of Arkansas at Monticello and the Arkansas Forestry Association are working with colleagues across the southeastern United States to determine what’s going on with these stands.

In April, Grant Beckwith, Arkansas County extension staff chair, said he’d received calls from people concerned about pine trees whose green needles were turning brown and dropping.

Ford toured the areas and found that “all the trees dying were loblolly pine. About half of the dead trees show a proliferation of cones and is a reaction to stress and often before mortality.

“The decline could have a variety of causes. They could be stressed by several years’ of very wet springs,” said Vic Ford, a forester who is associate vice president for agriculture and natural resources for the Cooperative Extension Service. “That stress can leave trees weakened and vulnerable to damage from insects, disease or even herbicides.”

Other stress factors include drought, saturated conditions, lightning, injury to stem or roots, soil disturbance around the roots, crowded conditions and pollutants. Ford noted that in Arkansas County, the living trees around the dead ones showed various signs of stress.

Similar symptoms appeared in Ashley and Chicot counties.

Tech tools

Researchers are using a variety of approaches to investigate the causes. Samples from affected trees have been sent to a diagnostic lab at Auburn University. Results weren’t expected to be returned until later this month.

“We can use artificial intelligence, drones and geographic information systems to tease out clues to this decline,” Ford said. “We will need all the tools at our disposal to solve this case and find why forest health in these areas is being affected.”

Ford said that “conducting a survey and placing the locations on a map will help us to determine commonality of affected plots. 

“Plot locations on these images can be used to determine soils, topographic features, stand characteristics, and changes of tree and environmental changes over time,” he said. “This information is compiled with a geographic information system. This large and complex data set needs to be analyzed so that important factors can be identified. 

“Artificial intelligence programming can take complex information using several information sources and produce results. These programs allow the machines to discover information that is pertinent to cause and eliminate potential factors,” Ford said. “These routines learn from other dataset, computer routines, and mathematical models and can apply relationships within the plot data to cause and effect based on machine learning.”

Don’t panic

Michael Blazier, dean of the College of Forestry and Natural Resources at the University of Arkansas at Monticello, urged forestland owners to be patient until the exact cause of the decline can be pinpointed.

“What we don’t want is people to panic,” he said. “I’ve heard from landowners who are cutting and burning trees that appear to be in decline in an effort to keep anything from spreading. At this point, that kind of action might be premature. Determining how to change forest management in afflicted stands has to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.” 

“All of us are working hard to solve this issue that affects so many not only in Arkansas, but also the southeastern United States,” Blazier said. “Forestry, whether it’s through timber or the recreational opportunities it affords, is very important to the economies of the state and the South as a whole. It’s important we use all of our resources together to figure this out.”

Members of the public can report pine tree discoloration and/or mortality by filling out this survey: arcg.is/1HyHCu0.

To learn about extension programs in Arkansas, contact your local Cooperative Extension Service agent or visit www.uaex.uada.edu. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @AR_Extension. To learn more about Division of Agriculture research, visit the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station website: https://aaes.uada.edu/. Follow us on Twitter at @ArkAgResearch. To learn more about the Division of Agriculture, visit https://uada.edu/. Follow us on Twitter at @AgInArk.

About the Division of Agriculture
The University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture’s mission is to strengthen agriculture, communities, and families by connecting trusted research to the adoption of best practices. The Division of Agriculture conducts research and extension work within the nation’s historic land grant education system through the Agricultural Experiment Station and the Cooperative Extension Service.

The Division of Agriculture is one of 20 entities within the University of Arkansas System. It has offices in all 75 counties in Arkansas and faculty on five system campuses.

The University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture offers all its Extension and Research programs to all eligible persons without regard to race, color, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, age, disability, marital or veteran status, genetic information, or any other legally protected status, and is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer.