Stretch explanation: in popular culture the chestnut tree served as a major plot point in Richard Power's 2018 novel The Overstory, which won several major awards. His most recent novel was published in late September, so to some extent his name and plots are back in the news.

Stretchier explanation: Frequency illusion, also called Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. Per Wikipedia, "a cognitive bias in which, after noticing something for the first time, there is a tendency to notice it more often, leading someone to believe that it has a high frequency of occurrence"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

It was mentioned here in a comment[1] the other day on an an article about another attempt to recreate the aurochs and reintroduce it in Europe.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30327583

I figure, somebody saw that and read a bit more about it (as I did) and decided to share.

I'd suggest that it's due to a lot of folks reading "The Overstory" by Richard Powers which talks a bit about the loss of the American Chestnut.

I think it might be very simple. It only takes a couple of votes for a story to hit the front page. Those votes could have come from people like you who are on both sites. Once something hits the front page here, people seem to take it more seriously, which is a bit of a shame since so many quality submissions just slide off the new page because they fail to get the 2 or 3 necessary upvotes.