All Hope is Not Lost – Parks plan strategically to treat invasive plants

Long-term monitoring plots track the spread of invasive plants over time, as shown in these photos of a plot in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area

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So many weeds, so little time.

Invasive plants are a large and, literally, growing problem for many national parks. These unwelcome invaders reduce native biodiversity, alter forest structure, suppress tree regeneration, and pose significant threats to the long-term condition of parks’ forest health. A recently published paper on invasive plant trends by NPS I&M scientists highlighted analysis of 12 years worth of data collected from over 1,400 forest plots in 39 eastern national parks. They were concerned to find far more increasing than decreasing trends in invasive plant abundance. In fact, 80% of the parks had at least one significant increasing trend in invasive abundance over time. Any way you slice it, trying to slow or reverse the spread of invasive plants is a daunting task.

Strategic invasive plant management uses limited resources to protect park priorities.

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The Solution: Collaborative Strategic Planning

For many parks, managing invasive plant species can seem like an endless and insurmountable drain on staff time and park budgets. Limited resources paired with ever-increasing invasives makes for a challenging dilemma. Thus, strategic management is essential to control invasive species spread.

Enter: the Habitat and Invasive Species Management Planning Process, a decision-making tool developed by Art Gover of the Penn State Wildland Weed Management program, that can help parks prioritize where to focus limited resources so they can manage invasive plant species more effectively.

Luckily, parks are not in this alone. The NPS I&M program and regional Invasive Plant Management Teams (IPMT) are key allies in helping parks tackle issues like invasive species management. Regional IPMT’s in particular offer savvy technical expertise and can recommend and carry out treatment prescriptions. NPS I&M staff have also cultivated extensive datasets and performed ecological assessments in parks covering nearly two decades through baseline inventories and long-term forest health monitoring. These data, and the expertise among NPS I&M, IPMT and park staff provide the key inputs for the Habitat and Invasive Species Management Planning Tool.

The tool is site specific, evaluating the extent of invasive species in the most ecologically and culturally important areas of the park. Using information readily at hand, this powerful tool helps give parks ownership of the process and determine where best to focus their resources. It provides for seamless integration of existing I&M data, IPMT expertise, and park knowledge and priorities to create a strategic plan for parks to most effectively use their limited resources for invasive management when and where it is most important.

Growing Success Stories

A growing number of national parks in the eastern US are using this prioritization tool to tackle invasive species. Parks have found multiple uses for the tool’s recommendations, including:

• interactive digital maps of priority areas to guide treatment crews and direct volunteer Weed Warriors in the field.
• clearly-defined treatment goals to communicate with park neighbors and partners and leverage collaboration towards treating invasive plants.
• prioritized restoration plan for sensitive habitats damaged by severe storms.
• defensible science-based justification for compliance and planning.

New River Gorge National Park and Preserve protects rare plants and special habitats by treating invasive species. Source: NPS.

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“The planning tool allowed our parks to take a fresh look at invasive species management plans and easily incorporate data from vegetation mapping, EDDMapS, and long-term forest health monitoring, while taking into account opportunities for stewardship of rare or vulnerable plant communities, and weighting them accordingly.” – NPS Ecologist, Doug Manning

More Information

Watch a video on invasive plant trends in eastern national parks and the invasive species prioritization tool.

For NPS staff interested in using the invasive species prioritization tool, this sharepoint site provides the tool template, example plans, and other useful information to help you get started.

Authors: Ed Sharron, Stephanie Perles