Urgent felling of hundreds of acres of woodland and favourable weather conditions, have largely contained the spread of a disease threatening to kill larch trees across swathes of south west Scotland.

Forestry Commission Scotland (FCS) has extended its thanks to woodland owners and managers for their "huge level of cooperation and support" in working to help slow the spread of Phytophthora ramorum on larch.

It is a fungus-like pathogen which causes extensive damage and mortality to a wide range of trees and other plants infecting them with Ramorum disease, or 'Larch tree disease'. In the USA this is known as 'sudden oak death' because different strains can infect North American native oak.

However, the strains found here have had little effect on British oak, but larch is a different matter.

The species is integral to Scottish woodlands and easily identifiable at this time of year as the golden patches that punctuate the green expanse of Forestry Commission conifers.

A combined effort across the sector has been underway since late in 2010 when the disease first infected larch in the west of Scotland.

However, those efforts were ramped up significantly following a marked surge in the disease in the region in 2013 when about 12,500 acres of larch stands showed some signs of infection.

So far this year, 14 harvesting teams working in FCS woodland have felled 1500 acres of diseased larch stands in the Galloway areas as part of a strategy to manage the disease and its impacts over the course of the next few years.

FCS says the surge in the speed, extent and impact of the disease in south west Scotland in 2013 is thought to have resulted primarily from the wet and windy conditions experienced in the previous year, although the terrain and distribution of larch stands in the area also contributed to the outbreak.

However, the much drier summer of 2013 gave FCS an opportunity to 'catch up' .

Paddy Robertson, the Commission's Tree Health Operations Manager, said: "The slowdown in the rate of spread is partly due to the impact of weather and favourable terrain but also due to the swift responses from woodland owners and managers in helping with early detection and subsequent actions to fell infected stands as quickly as possible."