Near the bottom of a shady hillside in Jericho, a lone beech tree stretches high into the canopy, a relic of a bygone forest. Through luck or (hopefully) genetics, this mighty tree has avoided contracting beech bark disease—a fatal fungal pathogen that has proven deadly to mature beech trees. And it stands just outside a hotspot where a new pathogen called beech leaf disease (BLD) is spreading across Vermont forests. “Beech is here a lot as a sapling … but if you look out into the forest it’s not really common in the overstory,” said Jess Wikle Ph.D. ’24, lecturer in forestry and manager of the University of Vermont’s Research Forests. The beech trees that do succumb often send out a series of root sprouts before they die, turning a forest of big trees into a thicket of saplings. Beech leaf disease is different. It seems to be spreading faster and young beech trees tend to die first.