This is scientific American 60 second science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

When wildfires ripped through a landscape,

firefighters have the first and most immediate job.

But then, that burned moonscape

often passes into the hands of restoration ecologists

who yank out invasive species

and plant native seedlings in their place.

And we try to artificially give a start to these

communities that should resemble the communities that were there prior to

disturbance. Mateo Garbelato, a plant pathologist at UC Berkeley. The problem he said materials. and that's happened at restoration sites in the San Francisco Bay Area,

where restorers hoped that nursery-grown natives called Toyones

and sticky monkey flowers could be reintroduced.

Plant ecologists were looking at them and thinking oh why are these toions dying here or why are these

ticking monkey flowers dying large numbers in this restoration site so it happens that each one of those plant species

was reintroduced in a restoration effort and it had one or sometimes multiple of these pathogens that belong to the genus Phytophora,

which incidentally is the same genus of the pathogen that causes sudden of death,

and it's also the same genus of the

pathogen, the cause, the Irish potato famine.

Garbelato and his colleagues surveyed five native plant nurseries

for the Phytophora pathogen

and found that more than a quarter of the plants

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