OISC Teams with Bishop Museum for Early Detection
Who ya gonna call? … Weed-Busters!
When Bishop Museum ’s Alex Lau and Danielle Frohlich went looking for new invasive species, they didn’t have to look very far. They found one growing right on the Bishop Museum complex. Since July 2006, weed-busters Lau and Frohlich have been surveying for new plant introductions to O‘ahu. So far they have found about fifty new cultivated species not in the Museum’s records, and four new naturalized species.
Among the new cultivated plants discovered are several species of Tillandsias, an epiphytic bromeliad, and a new melastome, Topobea parasitica. Among the four new naturalized species is Rubus ellipticus, a blackberry plant that is notoriously difficult to control.
Though a grant from the Hawai‘i Invasive Species Council, the Bishop Museum and the O‘ahu Invasive Species Committee (OSIC) have teamed up to create a program that will protect O‘ahu from new weeds while they are still easy to control. In her closing remarks at the Hawai‘i Conservation Conference, New Zealand policy analyst Paula Warren remarked that in Hawai‘i, we tend to study weeds spreading and all the parties involved agree a certain plant is causing problems. It is already too late for a cheap and easy solution.
The O‘ahu Early Detection program aims to change that. With a diagnostic tool that will help predict a plant’s propensity for weediness and a crew to survey roads, nurseries, and other pathways of introduction, the O‘ahu Early Detection program can find out what is being introduced to Hawai‘i, what is safe, and what might jump the garden fence.
The diagnostic tool is called the Weed Risk Assessment (WRA) and was developed in Australia and New Zealand and modified for use in Hawai‘i and other Pacific Islands by Professor Curt Daehler of the University of Hawai‘i . The WRA screens plant species and assigns them a score based on their propensity to become weedy. A high scoring plant poses a high risk of becoming an invasive pest. The assessment is based on 49 questions that address several plant characteristics such as number of seeds produced and habitat preferences to determine if a species is likely to become weedy in Hawai‘i. Shahin Ansari, a botanist working out of Lyon Arboretum, is responsible for screening plant species with the WRA.
Lau and Frohlich will survey roadsides looking for new plants and forward what they find to the WRA. If they find something that appears to be naturalizing, the O‘ahu Invasive Species Committee Field Crew will do the actual control work. The OISC crew has already removed the Rubus ellipticus.
“With the Bishop Museum survey team, the WRA evaluation tool, and the OISC field crew on call, we can find weeds early and remove them immediately,” says OISC Project Manager Ryan Smith.
“In a lot of cases, weeds have run rampant on the other islands before we realize control is necessary. Miconia is a great example. If we had the WRA decades ago, we might have known that Miconia does not belong in Pacific forests. We could have saved thousands of acres of Tahitian forests, not to mention millions of dollars and lots of labor here in Hawai‘i. Now that we have this tool, we can make predictions and take care of weeds the most efficient way possible---before they start to spread,” he said.
For more information about OSIC and Bishop Museum ’s joint efforts to identify invasive species in cooperation with the O‘ahu Invasive Species Committee, call (808) 847-3511 or visit www.bishopmuseum.org.
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