Empowering Managers to Mitigate Habitat Declines in Allegheny Hardwood Forests: Testing Fungicide and Fertilization as Practical Options (2026)

Empowering managers to mitigate habitat declines in Allegheny Hardwood Forests: testing fungicide and fertilization as practical options. This project will compare to what degree foliar pathogens and soil nutrition, alone and in tandem, affect black cherry seedling establishment, growth, survival. Additionally, we will assess whether treatments shift the composition of the regeneration layer. Our experiment will control pathogen loads through an aerial and operational-scale fungicide application coupled with fertilization treatments with nitrate and sulfate. Our fertilization approaches are based on well-established application rates coupled with a theory-driven scheme designed to explicitly test whether the known reductions in nitrate and sulfate deposition rates following the CAAA account for the observed declines. We strongly believe this latter mechanistic exploration can’t be separated from a sole test of applied treatment options at management scale, as it provides a foundational test of the nutrient shift hypothesis and bolsters the empirical support for fertilization as a deployable strategy. Importantly, this project does both: validates the mechanistic bases for factors that may enhance or challenge black cherry success and incorporates in its design a test of the most immediately accessible and deployable operational approaches to fungicide and single-entry fertilization treatments.