Thoughts on removing invasive plants at parks?

Hi!

I would go for it for sure, but please ask again for permissions. I often do it (I’m friend of the Environmental Manager of my town).

If you unknowingly working in a rare plant area, pulling up stuff or more, you can be damaging more than you are saving. The people that manage public land often know what’s there, and care deeply about it. It’s important to work with them.

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I first noticed a few Tamarix ramosissima (salt-cedar) growing in the river bottoms near me and reported it to the local Corp of Engineers, but they weren’t interested. Now it is widely distributed and eventually will become a solid stand of salt-cedar that will be quite difficult to remove and will spread to other areas causing enormous destruction to local biota. It seems that our institutions can only respond to a severe crisis, and that usually after it is too late.

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I also grew up in SW Ohio (I recogize all those locations, used to do a lot of nature hiking when I was in the “Junior Zoologists Club” at the Cinci Zoo).

I’m now in Raleigh, NC - besides my bird work I do a lot of outreach and I’m headed to Matthews on April 18 to spend a day at Socrates Academy. :grin:

I’ve also been doing invasive plant removal followed by native plant installations at a nearby small Raleigh Park. They DO have protocols for projects like this. They LOVE to have volunteers sign up. They simply want you to register, submit your proposal, etc, and off we go.

Most every place will have a system in place. Keep in mind, as mentioned above, some agencies are overworked, understaffed, and underpaid. So it can take some time for someone to get back to you. I’m fortunate in that our Parks system has an “invasive plant” coordinate, someone to help monitor biodiversity; and a very large, organized volunteer program.

I will also call out the part about “doing good”. Removing those plants alone isn’t necessarily doing good. If you do not 1. follow up, every few months, they often come right back. And/or 2. prep the location and then quickly plant natives, if the orginal invasive didn’t return, a different invasive species will.

You cannot just pull and walk away. It does no good.

Also, in our case here, there are major fines in place for doing this work, without permission. And then, you end up with a lot of bad press. It’s not worth it and lo and behold, people end up bad-mouthing those of us promoting natives.

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Hi John! Gosh, Socrates Academy is just a few miles from my home. Are you giving a presentation there? I may like to come and listen, besides meeting a fellow iNat person!!! If you’re presenting at Socrates, which aspect of iNat/bugs are you talking about and what grade level? Don’t worry cuz I don’t like public speaking unless I have one of my puppets with me. Or it’s a very small group of very young children. I’ll be so quiet!:shushing_face: That’s exciting! My husband is sorta into SEEK as he takes pictures of insects to check and see if I have ‘it’ before he nets it. He’s fairly good at netting dragonflies, unfortunately his method rarely gets them inside the net. He needs some work on that!!
Please let me know if you would want to meet! I haven’t met any iNat folks and I won’t be driving up to Raleigh. Cathy

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