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I’m Tyler. I am the Plant Healthcare Manager for Front Range Arborists.

I just like to take a couple minutes to talk a little bit about Emerald Ash Borer. It’s an invasive wood-boring insect that was just discovered in the Pikes Peak region this July. We’ve gotten a lot of questions about it, a lot of phone calls, so I’m just going to talk a little bit about where it came from, what it does, the potential impacts that it’s going to have on the ash trees in Colorado Springs, and a little about what we can do to mitigate the effects of Emerald Ash Borer.

The Emerald Ash Borer is an invasive wood-boring beetle that was first detected in the United States in 2002 in a port area near Detroit, Michigan. It was first brought over, we believe, in solid wood packing material from Asia. Since then, it has spread through most of the Midwest and most of the eastern United States. It has caused roughly $12 billion of economic impact and has killed tens of millions of trees in the time since it was discovered.

It was first found in Colorado in 2013, where it had largely been isolated toward the greater Denver and greater Boulder areas until probably about a year or two ago, whenever it really started to spread, and has now been found in El Paso County as of 2026.

The reason why we’re so concerned about the presence of Emerald Ash Borer is because it’s a non-native insect. It has no natural predators, and none of the ash trees in North America have natural defenses against Emerald Ash Borer.

So that means every ash tree is susceptible to some degree, and there’s nothing natural that can control it. One of the major concerns with Emerald Ash Borer being in Colorado Springs is that roughly 15 to 20% of our urban canopy is ash trees. So, a significant loss of ash trees can create a significant impact economically and environmentally in our neighborhood and in our community.

One thing that makes Emerald Ash Borer difficult to control is the fact that it spends most of its life cycle underneath the bark. Adults are only active and visible from about late May, early June into about mid-August. So, in that time, that’s whenever people normally will see them flying around or on their ash trees. But most of the damage is occurring whenever the larvae are feeding underneath the bark in late summer.

The adults will emerge in May and June and will go through a period of maturation feeding, where they will feed on the leaves of the ash tree before laying eggs in early to midsummer. Those eggs will hatch and the larvae will bore into the tree, where they will feed underneath the bark on the cambium, which is the nutrient-rich, live tissue underneath the bark. They’ll remain there until they emerge as adults in the following spring.

As these larvae feed, they create really meandering, almost serpentine-like galleries underneath the bark, which cuts off a lot of moisture and nutrient flow to the tree and will ultimately be the reason why these beetles kill the trees.

Because many of the ash trees in Colorado Springs are already a little stressed, it can be difficult to detect whether or not a tree has been attacked by Emerald Ash Borer. Many of the signs and symptoms associated with Emerald Ash Borer attack are also associated with ash trees that have just been under a high amount of stress for multiple seasons.

Things like thinning canopies and split bark don’t necessarily mean that trees are infested with Emerald Ash Borer, but they are clues that we look at whenever we’re trying to identify trees that might be infested with Emerald Ash Borer.

On top of thinning canopies and split bark, we’re also looking for small, D-shaped exit holes that can be anywhere on scaffolding branches and the trunk or the main stem of the tree. We’re looking in those bark cracks for signs that there might be the feeding galleries of the larvae.

We’re looking for large amounts of what we call water sprouts or epicormic shoots, which are kind of bushy growths coming up from the ground, the trunk of the tree, or even branches of the tree. And we’re looking for woodpecker damage.

All of these things can help us put together whether or not a tree has been infested with Emerald Ash Borer and help us determine if we can treat the tree retroactively or if the tree needs to be removed.

In response to Emerald Ash Borer, there’s several different paths that we can take. I’d like to advise everybody who has large, healthy, mature ash trees to have those trees evaluated to make sure that they’re currently not being attacked and to strongly consider Emerald Ash Borer preventative injections.

These injections are done at the base of the tree. It’s minimally invasive, and the trees are injected all the way around the base of the tree. The chemical is taken up by the tree, distributed through the tree, and that will protect the tree for about two years.

A little bit of an investment now can help protect these large, mature, healthy trees into the future.

Trees that are maybe not in the greatest of health, that might be infested, or in otherwise poor growing areas, can be candidates for removal or removal and replacement. We can always get a tree replaced with a non-susceptible species like maple, oak, or honey locust and kind of save some of that heartache later.

Emerald Ash Borer carries a fungus called white rot, which is very detrimental to the structure of trees that have been killed by Emerald Ash Borer. What this does is it weakens the tree so much that it will essentially begin falling apart after a couple years.

So, if you delay in getting your ash tree removed after it’s been killed by Emerald Ash Borer, it can become quite a hazard and be very difficult and even more costly to remove in the future.

If you believe that your ash tree has been infested, or you think that your ash tree might become infested, or if you just have a high-value ash that you’re looking to have protected, give Front Range Arborists a call.

We’ve got plenty of arborists with Emerald Ash Borer experience, and we would love to help you out in keeping your ash trees healthy and help mitigate the effects of this pest as it makes its way through the Pikes Peak region.