Answered for Cumberland, Marion County (town limits extend east and north into Hancock County) County.
Effectively endemic on Indiana blue spruce. It is the single most common reason a blue spruce gets removed here. In Cumberland, the biggest and oldest trees stand in Old Town along US 40, over houses on a corridor continuously settled since 1831 — that is where a crew will meet 100-plus-year specimens with structures under them on both sides. Buck Creek carries the bottomland canopy, the east-side Hancock County subdivisions date from the 1970s through the 2000s and their canopy is mid-life, and ash has been removed across central Indiana by emerald ash borer; no published street-tree inventory exists for the town. Rhizosphaera needlecast is near-universal on mature blue spruce here.
Cumberland's canopy and what's at risk
The biggest and oldest trees stand in Old Town along US 40, over houses on a corridor continuously settled since 1831 — that is where a crew will meet 100-plus-year specimens with structures under them on both sides. Buck Creek carries the bottomland canopy, the east-side Hancock County subdivisions date from the 1970s through the 2000s and their canopy is mid-life, and ash has been removed across central Indiana by emerald ash borer; no published street-tree inventory exists for the town.
What to look for
Needles browning and dropping from the bottom of the tree upward and from the inside out, leaving bare lower limbs.
Whether the tree can be saved
Rhizosphaera needlecast is near-universal on mature blue spruce here. Fungicide can hold the line on a tree that still has most of its canopy; a spruce that's bare halfway up is not coming back, because spruce doesn't refoliate old wood.
Timing in Marion County (town limits extend east and north into Hancock County) County
Two fungicide applications in spring, repeated for two to three consecutive years. Miss a year and it resets.
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