Austin Brady
speaker
20 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2012
last heard Nov 2012
Austin Brady’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
As the dots on the map have sort of increased over the last few weeks, I think people have mistakenly assumed that that's a sign of the disease spreading rapidly.
I think the reality is that it's a sign of the survey having been gradually rolled out across the country...
That's correct, yes.
The disease is spread by small spores that come out of the fallen leaves and parts of the stems of the leaves that have fallen to the ground.
And those spores only really spread between about June to September, October.
So at this time of year, there are no spores actively spreading.
So the sense that the disease is popping up in other places is really because people are now more vigilant, they're looking for the signs and they're putting the dots on the map to give us a snapshot of where it is today.
If you could imagine something that looks more or less like a twig, about 18 inches long with some roots on the bottom, that's the kind of scale that we're talking about.
And those kinds of saplings, the bulk of those have been destroyed.
That's almost going to the other end of the scale, I guess.
But I guess the most accurate thing to say would be that 100,000 saplings have been destroyed in nurseries or removed from recent planting sites.
Looking across Europe, the range of figures in terms of how many trees have been affected and potentially will die does vary from round about 60%.
up to the 90% that's been quoted for Denmark.
So it's more accurate to say that on average, 70% of trees across Europe have been infected.
The other key bit of information we need to get a better understanding of is what proportion of the ash trees in different parts of Europe are resistant to the disease.
We've heard figures that it may be as low as 2% in the UK, based on the experience of Denmark, but reports from parts of Poland suggest
that they may have found up to 20% of the ash population to be resistant to the disease.
I think it's a situation where people are looking partly at the worst possible scenario, but also jumping to sort of some conclusions early on as to how the disease will behave in this country.
And I suppose in a way one of the risks with the way the media handles the story is
is if they paint such a really awful black and bleak picture, then people give up hope of doing anything positive, and that would be a shame.
Showing 1–20 of 20