SEARCHING FOR CHESTNUT LITERATURE

1. In 2004, TACF, the National Park Service, and Penn State University held a conference to exhibit the most current knowledge on scientific research and chestnuts. The papers submitted as part of that conference may be found here: Restoration of the American Chestnut to Forest Lands.

2. Government chestnut breeding documents (under construction) - Over the years, we have come into possession of some great publications put out by the USDA and affiliated agencies. Click here to browse the selection which includes breeding records from the Connecticut Agriculture Experiement Station, reports from Jesse Diller (strong proponent of the use of the Clapper tree for American chestnut restoration), as well as chestnut bibliographies that have been published in the past. *** Just added *** The Reports of the PA Chestnut Tree Blight Commission ****

3. Do some research on your own. There are some great websites out there that offer ample opportunity for searching for scientific information. I recommend:

• Google Scholar - This is a great place to start. Perhaps the only place where both searching and access to abstracts of scientific literature is available for free.
• ISI Web of Knowledge - This link will take you to a website that allows the user to search scientific literature for free.
• Scirus - In their own words, "Scirus is the most comprehensive science-specific search engine on the Internet."
• CAB Direct - Not the best, but this link will take you to a website that allows the user to research agricultural and biological abstracts from peer-reviewed journals, academic books, technical reports, bulletins, and conference proceedings. They offer a free quick text search of their databases, as well as a 24-hour free trial of all of their services.

4. The Journal of TACF - (right-click to save the target file. size = 50KB) An index of TACF Journal articles. This link points to an Excel file that documents all of the articles written for the Journal of The American Chestnut Foundation. Many thanks to Timothy McKechnie for providing the original document which he posted to the TACF Listserv. Some past issues are available on-line from the TACF website. You may also order back issues from TACF.

Since not all past issues are yet available from the TACF website, I have posted as complete a collection High Quality Scans are actual PDF scans/copies of the Journals. All others, if availble are PDFs which contain only the word portions of the Journals. Note, also, that there are some formatting problems associated with those poor quality versions which can lead to poor chart conversion or typos.

Recently, a few interns have been helping to make the poor quality scans and not available issues become high quality scans. Many, many, many thanks to Artur Prociuk, Maria Nowicka, Lisa Jo Scarbrough and Dan Wilson for all of their hard work and computer time finding the back Journals, scanning them, and proofing them. We've almost got a full set!

		Ban Li - The original Chinese text was drawn up in 1979 for use within Chinese production areas. A translation was commissioned by Phil Rutter of TACF.