WORCESTER, Mass.  People who live in this city’s Greendale neighborhood love the maples that shade their streets in summer and turn beautiful colors in fall. But most of the maples in Greendale are now painted with red dots, indicating that they will be chopped down as early as next month because of an infestation of Asian long-horned beetles that is plaguing thousands of Worcester’s trees.

When a tornado devastated Worcester in 1953, maples were planted as replacement trees. “Norway maples were readily available back then,” said Brian Breveleri, the city’s urban forester. “And they were popular because they could weather the cold.”

But when Worcester plants new trees this time around, it will vary the type. A tree inventory, completed in 2006, showed that 80 percent of its street trees were maples, which the beetles find irresistible. The city should ideally have about half as many maples.

“Tree diversity helps prevent pests from gaining a foothold,” said Mike Bohne, forest health group leader for the United States Forest Service. “It also makes it so that a community does not lose its entire urban canopy if there is an infestation.”