Leaves and fruit of the common ash, Fraxinus excelsiorWIKIMEDIA, JESMOND DENE
Botanists in the UK have teamed up with game development company Team Cooper to design a social media game that uses real genetic data from the common ash tree, Fraxinus excelsior, and from the Chalara fraxinea fungus to find out what makes some trees less susceptible to it.
“The more people who play it, the more accurate the results will be for us and the quicker we can generate the information needed to help our woodlands recover from the current epidemic,” Dan MacLean, the lead botanist behind the game, called Fraxinus, said in a statement.
Chalara has wiped out between 60 percent to 90 percent of ash trees in Denmark and threatens many of the UK’s 80 million ash trees, some of which are more ...
