A race is underway to save Ontario’s vanishing American chestnut trees, once a dominant species in the province’s southern forests.

This summer, two undergraduate students from the University of Guelph are trekking through forests to find, tag and assess the few chestnuts that remain.

An estimated two million of the trees — known for their spiny fruit husks containing edible, glossy nuts — once covered about 70 per cent of the canopy. Today, less than one per cent remain . Most are sick and unable to reproduce after a devastating fungus arrived in the early 1900s . Without intervention, they could vanish within 150 years.

Katerina Trieselmann, a bachelor of science student in environmental biology and Caitlin Barton, entering her fourth year in zoology, are tracking the he

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