Hello Jonathan,

This is a severe case of leaf dehydration but we can't tell if it is only due to soil drying or another factor, such as damage to the trunk (which may or may not be visible externally), physical injury to the roots, exposure to certain herbicide ingredients, or some other issue. You can feel the soil about six inches deep in the root zone of the tree to see if it's very dry or sufficiently moist, though this snapshot in time of soil wetness won't necessarily explain what happened when this damage began. We can't predict whether the tree will recover based on its appearance alone, but with this much leaf death, we find it unlikely it would recover well, if at all.

If you aren't in a rush to replace it and want to wait until spring, you can see if it leafs-out normally then. If it remains bare once other trees have leafed-out, it's dead. For now, you can lightly scratch the bark on several branches to see if the cambium (water and nutrient transport tissues that lie just underneath bark) is still alive, but sometimes a plant can be dying and not show cambium death for some time later as a delayed symptom, so this is not a foolproof test for that one point in time. (See the linked video for a quick demonstration of how to scrape the bark.) If the branches fail the test (cambium appears dead) and no cambium checks made progressively further towards the trunk show live wood, that is a good indication most or all of the canopy has died and will not recover.

Miri