The American Chestnut Foundation

The American Chestnut Foundation has several efforts underway to help restore the American Chestnut tree. There are many ways to get involved as a citizen scientist:

1. Hiking and counting American chestnuts. We have a few upcoming training events, usually all done by the end of June. We’ve been concentrating on the Appalachian Trail, but hope to expand the project beyond there.

2. Planting breeding orchards / germplasm conservation orchards of American chestnuts: Involves planting chestnut trees, maintaining the planting, and sending yearly measurements to our central office.

3. Breeding / Harvesting chestnut trees: Involved finding American chestnuts on which to breed, following their flowering, and performing controlled pollinations on the trees through the end of June and beginning of July. Follow-up during harvest in September and October is the final step. Harvesting can be done on it’s own without controlled pollinations

4. Participating in the data collection, testing and selection of advanced breeding materials. If one does not want to plant their own orchard, we hope to match interested people with current growers to help maintain and collect data on orchards already in place.

5. Outreach liaison: More of an outreach position, and potentially less of a citizen science position, but we have continuing need for folks to learn about our program and give presentations to various groups - anyone from girl scouts to Audubon groups and Lions’ Clubs - anything of that ilk.