American Chestnut
| American chestnut Castanea dentata |
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| American chestnut leaves and nuts | |
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Not evaluated (IUCN 3.1)
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| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Plantae |
| (unranked): | Angiosperms |
| (unranked): | Eudicots |
| (unranked): | Rosids |
| Order: | Fagales |
| Family: | Fagaceae |
| Genus: | Castanea |
| Species: | C. dentata |
| Binomial name | |
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Castanea dentata (Marsh.) Borkh. |
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| Natural range of Castanea dentata | |
The American chestnut (Castanea dentata) is a large, monoecious deciduous tree of the beech family native to eastern North America. Before the species was devastated by the chestnut blight, a fungal disease, it was one of the most important forest trees throughout its range, and was considered the finest chestnut tree in the world. It is estimated that between 3 and 4 billion American chestnut trees were destroyed in the first half of the 20th century by blight after its initial discovery in 1904. Very few mature specimens of the tree exist within its historical range, although many small shoots of the former live trees remain. There are hundreds of large (2 to 5 ft diameter) American chestnuts outside its historical range, some in areas where less virulent strains of the pathogen are more common, such as the 600 to 800 large trees in northern Lower Michigan.
Castanea dentata is a rapidly growing deciduous hardwood tree, historically reaching up to 30 metres (98 ft) in height, and 3 metres (9.8 ft) in diameter. It ranged from Maine and southern Ontario to Mississippi, and from the Atlantic coast to the Appalachian Mountains and the Ohio Valley. It has several related chestnut species, such as the European sweet chestnut, Chinese chestnut, and Japanese chestnut, which are distinguishable from the American species by a few morphological traits, such as leaf shape, petiole length and nut size. C. dentata was once one of the most common trees in the Northeastern United States. In Pennsylvania alone, it is estimated to have comprised 25–30% of all hardwoods. The tree's huge population was due to a combination of rapid growth and a large annual seed crop in comparison to oaks which do not reliably produce sizable numbers of acorns every year. Nut production begins when C. dentata is 7–8 years old.
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Wikipedia