The U.S. Forest Service is considering closing 57 of its 77 research labs across the country, including two in Connecticut. Both labs focus on managing invasive insects — like spongy moths, spotted lanternflies and Asian long-horned beetles — to prevent trees from dying.
The move is part of a national restructuring plan to save money by consolidating labs into regional facilities. But scientists and advocates worry the closures will delay the agency’s ability to respond to invasive insects in the Northeast and hinder field research in local forests.
“I think it’s ridiculous,” said David Mikus, a retired lab technician who worked at the Forest Service’s labs in Connecticut for 45 years.
“When you do research like this, you travel to the places where these problems are. Well, if your lab is centrally located in the country, I think it makes it harder to send a group of researchers out to where these problems are. It puts up a barrier on doing this kind of research,” he said.
What the proposal would do
The U.S. Forest Service has two Connecticut facilities it's considering closing – a research lab in Hamden and a quarantine lab in Ansonia.
If the closures do happen, they would take place in phases over the coming year and staff would be relocated to one central office in Warren, Pennsylvania, according to a map from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“These are proposed closures, nothing is final,” said a USDA spokesperson in a statement, noting the relocation does not mean work on invasive insects is going away.
“The reorganization does not eliminate scientific positions, cancel research programs, or reduce our national research footprint,” the spokesperson said. “Staff and programs will continue their work, relocated into fewer facilities while maintaining research presence across the country.”
But experts say the labs in Connecticut are already in a prime location to catch invasive insects accidentally brought into the United States from other countries via shipping ports.
When the Asian long-horned beetle was discovered in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 2008, scientists from the U.S. Forest Service in Connecticut were able to breed the insect in its quarantine lab in Ansonia for further research.
Scientists have historically worked to manage invasive insects by breeding hundreds of them in Connecticut’s quarantine lab, along with hundreds of predator insects that feed on them.
Mikus recalled summers when Connecticut scientists would “get these trailers and take them out to these forests and people would live there” to gather leaves and insects.
“If our lab is closed, how are we going to respond so quickly to a problem like this and try to get ahead of it as much as we can?” Mikus asked. “More trees will die.”
Invasive insects expected to kill more than a million trees in the US by 2050
Across New England, insects are now responsible for almost a quarter of tree deaths, according to a new study from the University of Vermont. Meanwhile, across the country, invasive insects are expected to kill 1.4 million trees by 2050.
“We've hit a turning point where dead and dying trees are going to become a more common feature of our landscape, which, you know, unless you're a woodpecker, you aren't going to be excited about,” said Anthony D’Amato, professor of silviculture and forest ecology at the University of Vermont and a co-author on the study about insects and tree deaths in New England.
The Connecticut labs also worked to develop viruses to kill invasive insects and helped to slow the spread of the spongy moth, said Zander Evans, executive director of the Forest Stewards Guild who did doctoral research at the Connecticut labs in the early 2000s.
“I remember spongy moth so thick in the playground that you'd give up and go home,” Evans said.
“That's less common now because of the work folks in the Hamden lab [did] identifying this virus, which curtails their growth,” he said.
“It's this kind of work that is really painstaking, requires lots of training, but is really irreplaceable.”
Áine Pennello is a Report for America corps member, covering the environment and climate change for Connecticut Public
