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Mel Poole, superintendent of Catoctin Mountain Park, has identified environmental factors that represents threats to the Catoctin Forest and Catoctin’s natural and scenic environment (visit Environmental Factors at the Catoctin Mountain Park site of the National Park Service). The types of threats include:



Air Quality

Air Quality includes three major components: visibility, ozone, and noxious chemicals such as acid rain. Visibility, often referred to as haze, is affected by a number of vectors including particulate matter, gasses, and water vapor. In general, areas in the eastern United States have a much lower visibility range than comparable areas in the west. This is primarily due to higher humidity and sulfate particles. Ozone, a major component of smog, is created when exhaust fumes from vehicles, lawn mowers, or emissions from power plants and industrial facilities react in sunlight. Ozone reduces visibility and contributes to animal and human health problems and has been known to cause damage to plants at surprisingly low concentrations.

Diseases

Dogwood Anthracnose is a disease caused by the fungus Discula destructiva that attacks native and ornamental flowering dogwood Dogwood trees can be affected at any time throughout the growing season, but are most susceptible to the fungus in the cool, wet seasons of spring and fall. Trees weakened by drought or winter injury are especially vulnerable to infection. In 1991, it was estimated that 79% of the park’s dogwoods were dead, with no sign of regeneration. At this rate, dogwoods would soon be eliminated from the park. However, a few dogwood trees have been discovered at Catoctin that show resistance to the disease.

The American chestnut tree (Castanea dentata) once dominated the eastern forests from Maine to Alabama and comprised 50% of the mountain forests of this country. In the first 40 years of the 20th century, blight destroyed 3.5 billion American chestnuts. What had been the most important tree in our Eastern forest was reduced to insignificance. No comparable devastation of a species exists in recorded history. In size they were the "redwoods of the east" growing to a height of over 100 feet and a diameter of nearly 10 feet. Many of the cabins in the park are constructed from chestnut wood. With a dependable crop of nuts, chestnut was of great value to man and wildlife. Today, chestnuts can only be found in the understory, as shoots from the blight resistant roots. By the time they reach 20 feet in height the blight attacks and kills them. The  American Chestnut Cooperators' Foundation is a nonprofit scientific and educational  foundation dedicated to restoring the American Chestnut to its former place in our Eastern hardwood forests.  Priorities include the development of blight-resistant all-American chestnuts and economical biological control measures against chestnut blight in the  forest environment.   As of April 2007, American chestnut cooperators have planted 117,792 seedlings and 59,628 seednuts from our all-American orchards. http://www.ppws.vt.edu/griffin/accf.html