A few years ago it was my pleasure to serve on the Appalachian Trail Conservancy's (ATC's) Stewardship Council.

The A.T. is one of the longest continuously marked footpaths in the world. It was completed in 1937, and has been a National Park since 1968. The trail runs roughly 2,190 miles from Georgia to Maine, through public and private lands with a wide range of land uses and management goals. You can't draw a line that long anywhere in the U.S. without having hundreds of hig...

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Yesterday I was out on a friends' property in West Virginia, on a New Years' Day hike, which happened to take us past a patch of Tree of Heaven that they had eradicated 2 years ago.

Today I surfed over to plants.usda.gov to find they had picked "Tree of Heaven" as the plant of the week!

Ailanthus altissima is an invasive exotic, particularly in the eastern states. Originally from China, it was introduced in Philadelphia in 1784. It sprouts from the roots and is a prolif...