by Carolyn Bernhardt
August 11, 2026
Oak trees can take decades to reach their full stature, making countless valuable contributions to their surrounding ecosystems at every stage. Just like the mighty oak standing at the center of her research, Anna Yang’s years-long investigation into oak wilt reflects a similar kind of enduring devotion: steady and rooted in the long view.
Anna Yang, PhD, has built her career around protecting forest species and ecosystems while working closely with the people who care for and depend on them. Since 2012, she has researched oak wilt in various capacities, with her fervor only gathering momentum along the way. Now, Yang is a postdoctoral fellow at the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education in St. Paul, lending her expertise to a MITPPC-funded project focused on how oak wilt management affects the future of oak forests in Minnesota.
Devotion to Minnesota
A born-and-raised Minnesotan, she has dedicated her academic and professional career to improving forest health across the state that’s near and dear to her heart. “Minnesota is my home,” she says. “I am among the thousands of second-generation Hmong here, which is fairly unique to Minnesota.” And, she says, it’s one of the reasons the state feels like a place of permanence for her—a fact reflected in her constellation of degrees from the University.
She completed her BS in Plant Biology in 2011, her MS in Plant Pathology in 2014, and her PhD in Natural Resources Science and Management in 2024, all at the U of M. Yang says she set her sights on the U at just 12 years old. “Like many scientists, I’ve always been a classic nerd,” she says. “[I recognized] even then that [the U of M] is one of the best public research institutions in the nation.”
Drawn to the interdisciplinary nature of forest pathology and ecology, her work has evolved over time from using DNA to detect tree diseases to studying the broader ecological impacts of introduced diseases. Yang takes great pride in working with managers and learning from them. It’s a skill set her work on different MITPPC-funded projects has helped foster. “It’s challenging to produce useful, actionable research without an intimate understanding of how your research will be translated to practice,” she says.
Research with follow-through
Prior to her role at Oak Ridge, Yang was a Pathways Intern at the U.S. Forest Service. This role allowed her to be involved with the MITPPC-funded oak wilt research on testing double vibratory plow lines and hyperspectral remote sensing led by Jeannine Cavender-Bares, PhD.
That project wrapped up in 2021, after using hand-held, drone-based, airborne, and spaceborne sensors to detect spectral signatures of oak wilt disease at the leaf, canopy, landscape, and regional levels. This team also documented the two-pass vibratory plow protocol as an oak wilt management best practice, a study led by Jennifer Juzwik, PhD.
To Yang, the research highlighted the importance of incorporating land manager expertise into a study’s design and approach, and learning from it in real time. She remembers being surprised at the time to find the forester the team worked with using a unique approach to marking the boundaries of disease containment. “He had adapted his method based on decades of experience working with oak wilt,” says Yang. “We had to adjust the way we were looking at the project and asking questions. There is an art and practice to disease management, and we really got to work with that firsthand on this project.”
Eventually, Yang helped translate the practitioner's method for oak wilt containment into a conceptual model for other foresters to use. That publication is forthcoming, but Yang says it also jumpstarted a separate USFS-funded project she is now working on, looking at survival of the oak wilt pathogen in the roots of diseased trees. “That project, plus the experimental structure and relationships we established through the MITPPC work, ended up forming two chapters of my dissertation,” she says.
Turning over a new leaf
Since 2025, Yang and colleagues have been using some of the containment sites they established previously to measure light, and to survey plants in oak wilt-affected sites. This newer endeavor aims to better understand how oak forests change after the disease.
Treating oak wilt can open the forest canopy, allowing shade-tolerant species and invasive buckthorn to replace removed oaks. Researchers on this project, led by Rebecca Montgomery, PhD, are investigating whether herbicides effectively limit the spread of oak wilt underground. They are also evaluating how management strategies affect oak regeneration and forest communities, and whether planting oaks can improve regeneration.
“We found that, in many places in Minnesota, red maples are faring better than red oaks,” Yang says. “This isn’t inherently bad, but oaks are a keystone species and serve a lot of functions that maples cannot.” In addition, oak wilt is most severe in places with a high abundance of red oak species. “Diversifying tree species on the landscape could be a silver lining, depending on what a manager’s long-term goals are,” says Yang.
As the team was preparing for their herbicide trial, they once again engaged with managers across Minnesota, as well as the Great Lakes states and Northeast U.S., to learn more about managers’ experiences using herbicides to contain oak wilt. “We found that there are tremendously varied experiences, chemicals, and application methods that folks have been using to varying degrees of success,” Yang says. “Our experiment addresses a very practical need for the state, but I suspect that we will have lingering questions that are important to the broader U.S. and Canada.”
Yang’s pursuit of oak wilt has helped power essential advancements in managing the pathogen, and she is not slowing down. “Oak wilt is a really interesting system to work in because we have a rare opportunity to truly limit spread and look at long-term impacts before any widespread, catastrophic mortality,” she says. “I’ve continued to work in this system because there is a real need to improve management in the present while also looking at what the future holds for regenerating oaks in areas with oak wilt.”
The Minnesota Invasive Terrestrial Plants and Pests Center research is supported by the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, as recommended by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources.
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More information
- Management and impacts of oak wilt in lake states forests, dissertation by Anna Yang
- Detection and treatment of oak wilt, research project
- Detecting invasive tree diseases using spaceborne phenological observations, research project
- Oak wilt management: a changing landscape, research project
- Oak wilt information, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources
- Oak wilt in Minnesota, UMN Extension