So I, I wanna start, as we do every year, with why does this happen? Why are we treated to fall color in, you know, the, the waning days of the growing season?

'Cause we live in the Midwest deciduous forest, and those deciduous forest basically go to sleep, hopefully, depending on the weather in the wintertime.

And part of that process, the leaves aren't really dying.

They're shutting down for the season, and they're taking material that they've been producing all year or material that they're recently producing, and they're getting that back into the tree for storage for next year.

And so part of that process, um, all summer most leaves are green.

They produce a pigment called chlorophyll, and there's a lot of pigments associated with, uh, tree leaves.

And there are some pigments that have to sit underneath the chlorophyll all year long, and they're covered up, and they're just kinda waiting.

Ooh

Now, you already hinted at this, but with non-native invasive species, when they move into a woodland, what are the problems that they can cause?

Well, one of the things is they're taking space of plants that should be there.

And again, like I said, a lot of times those plants aren't from here.

And we can have this argument of native, non-native, and that's for hours and hours and days and days.

But generally, they don't have natural predators, so their populations aren't kept in check.

A lot of times they can just kind of take off.

And if there's native plants in the understory that are competing with them, those native plants often cannot compete because they have other things keeping them in check and in balance.

If you cannot walk through the understory, Mark, how do you begin to manage

What are some of the indications you're seeing?

Well, I would like to add that the last couple years, we were really dry.

And going through the winter, coming up, we were kind of talking about pre-drought and stuff before we got those April rains and stuff.

So all those things expose plants that are already in the ground to stresses and maybe setting things up.

But with the moisture...

Every time I think people call about their sycamores, we had a lot of sycamores that turned brown this spring with anthracnose.

We've seen that all over the state.

anthracnose is a fungal disease?

Why is that?

Right.

So, I, I mean, specifically in Iowa, like with, with white oak specifically, we, we've had oak decline probably since about, we've talked about white oak decline since about 2014.

To this day, we still don't know why [laughs] but we, we have seen loss of white oak, s- specifically more mature stuff.

I was talking to one of our specialists the other day.

I see plantations of 10-year-old to 30-year-old white oak, and to me, they're doing pretty decent.

But we might be starting to see decline of trees that are in that 18 to 20 inch.

And we can't definitively say what causes oak tatters, but there's a lot of suspicion that it's because of the agrochemicals that we use in this state.