Article Acute Oak Decline and Agrilus biguttatus: The Co-Occurrence of Stem Bleeding and D-Shaped Emergence Holes in Great Britain Nathan Brown 1,2,3,*, Mike Jeger 1,4, Susan Kirk 2, David Williams 2, Xiangming Xu 5, Marco Pautasso 6 and Sandra Denman 2 1 Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, Silwood Park campus, Ascot SL5 7PY, UK;
[email protected] 2 Centre for Ecosystems, Society and Biosecurity, Forest Research, Alice Holt Lodge, Farnham GU 4LH, UK;
[email protected] (S.K.);
[email protected] (D.W.);
[email protected] (S.D.) 3 Department of Computational and Systems Biology, Rothamsted Research, Harpenden AL5 2JQ, UK 4 Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London, Silwood Park campus, Ascot SL5 7PY, UK 5 NIAB East Malling Research (EMR), New Road, East Malling ME19 6BJ, UK;
[email protected] 6 Animal and Plant Health Unit, European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), 43126 Parma, Italy;
[email protected] * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +44-1582-938174 Academic Editor: Sigrid Netherer Received: 10 January 2017; Accepted: 14 March 2017; Published: 17 March 2017 Abstract: Acute Oak Decline (AOD) is a new condition affecting both species of native oak, Quercus robur and Quercus petraea, in Great Britain. The decline is characterised by a distinctive set of externally visible stem symptoms; bark cracks that “weep” dark exudate are found above necrotic lesions in the inner bark. Emergence holes of the buprestid beetle, Agrilus biguttatus are often also seen on the stems of oak within affected woodlands.