Miller, James H.; Manning, Steven T.; Enloe, Stephen F. 2010. A management guide for invasive plants in southern forests. Gen. Tech. Rep. SRS–131. Asheville, NC: U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, Southern Research Station. 120 p.
Elements and Tasks
- Make a plan.
- Prevent entry and spread.
- Make a map of locations.
- Eradicate, control or contain, and monitor results.
- Rehabilitate, restore, or reclaim treated lands.
Persistently sticking to a plan of adaptive and collaborative restoration is the only successful strategy for safeguarding land access, productivity, native plants, and suitable habitats for wildlife.
Make a plan
Base your planned treatments on stated objectives and the best information, then schedule and acquire resources that support your plan, devise a timeline for implementation of your plan’s action items, and add some “wiggle room” for contingencies. Devise both a short- or long-term plan to include both specific infestation treatment regimes and ideas for how these fit into a general land management plan. Your maps of infestation locations and priority ratings of invasive species will assist the planning process.
An eradication and rehabilitation program for specific invasive plant infestations usually requires several years of treatments and many more years of surveillance to check for rhizome and root resprouts, seed germination, or new invaders. Newer infestations and smaller plants require much less time than extensive and dense infestations.
During the treatment and retreatment phase, you must take steps to safeguard, promote, or establish desirable vegetation. To effectively combat plant invasions and restore lands, you will need to carefully plan for each step in the program by incorporating primary and contingency schedules of enactment. You should project a minimum of 4 years and up to 10 years for older infestations and when less than maximum effective treatments are used. You can use short-term plans to target specific areas, but you will need a long-term management plan for an increasingly invaded landscape. You must consider surrounding lands, particularly the degree of current infestation in those lands as well as the invasive plant management programs the owners and managers of those lands have in place. You must also consider emerging State funding assistance programs.
Prevent entry and spread
Do not plant invasives such as those covered in this book, others listed in the appendix “Nonnative Invasive Plant Species Not to be Used or Recommended for Wildlife Food Plots nor Bird and Butterfly Viewing Gardens,” and those on your State’s noxious and invasive plant lists. For wildlife food plots, soil stabilization, and ornamentals, plant only native plants of local origin when possible or noninvasive alternatives.
- Educate yourself, employees, and other users of your land about the invasive plants that pose major threats and how to prevent their entry. Learn how to identify both invasive and native plants in your area. The more native plants that you can identify, the easier you will spot the “plants out of place.”
- Sanitation procedures to prevent the spread of invasives. Require those who work, hunt, and recreate on your lands, to minimize invasive plant spread by following these procedures when working in or near infested lands:
- Inspect the site and infestation before operations, especially noting the presence or absence of invasive plant fruit, seed heads, or spore clusters under climbing fern (Lygodium spp.) leaves. The absence of any of these propagules means that less stringent sanitation procedures will be required. When they are present and you are working in or near the infestation, maximum sanitation techniques should be followed to prevent spread.
- When possible, avoid driving vehicles, mowers, all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), or spray equipment through infestations in seed or fruit, especially late-flowering cogongrass [Imperata cylindrical (L.) Beauv.], and musk thistle (Carduus nutans L.). This is a very common means of spread for many species.
- Brush and wipe all seeds and debris from clothes, boots, socks, and personal protective equipment. Avoid wearing cuffed pants where seed may collect. Remove seeds from boot laces and soles before moving between infested sites. Carry large contractor-size refuse bags to stand in while brushing and removing seeds or place contaminated gear within the bag for careful cleaning at a designated location.
- When working in invasive plant infestations, thoroughly clean motorized equipment, especially the undercarriage and tire surfaces, where seed and plant parts are often inadvertently caught and transported. Pressure washers can be used in combination with a narrow spade, scraper, and stiff brush to remove mud, soil, and debris. The undercarriage, radiator front, and engine compartments must be inspected and washed when suspected contaminates are present. Remove excess grease and oil that trap and carry seeds, fruits, and spores. Modify vehicles and equipment in ways that will prevent buildup of debris or use the most appropriate vehicle that has the least potential for contamination.
- When moving cut invasive plants that have fruits and seeds offsite such as to a burn pile, always cover loads or bag before transport.
- Monitor burn pile areas for new seedlings as the fire may not consume or kill all seeds. Also, monitor any designated decontamination sites for seedlings.
- Sometimes sanitation seems almost impossible when dealing with invasive spore-forming species such as invasive climbing ferns, where spores are not easily seen. Avoid entering or working in invasive climbing fern infestations when spore clusters under special leaves are present. If entry is unavoidable, complete sanitation of all equipment, clothing, and workers is necessary to prevent potential spread. Plan entries into climbing fern infestations when spores are not present, which is October to November in the temperate parts of the region.
- Use only noncontaminated fill materials, mulches, and seeds. Inspect material sources at the site of origin for indications of contamination by invasive plants growing on or near the area.
- Regularly inspect areas where offsite fill materials have been used and areas used by visitors and lessees.
- Be careful not to disturb areas where there is a high probability of invasion. Most land disturbing activities raise the potential for establishment of aggressive plant invaders, especially when the invaders occur nearby.
- Most likely points of entry that need high-priority search and surveillance are:
- Lands adjacent to lands you do not own, highways, county roads, and utility rights-of-way and their edges and fencerows, especially after new construction or maintenance activities
- Internal roads, trails, and fire lines
- Lands next to streams, rivers, and lake shores, especially after recent flooding or high-flow periods
- Recently prepared and seeded wildlife food plots
- Harvested, thinned, burned, or storm-damaged areas during the years following disturbance
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Make a map and monitor results of locations
Identify invasive plant location sites at risk, and denote treatments and their outcomes. You must positively identify those invasive plants that are present and those poised to enter from adjacent lands, determine their locations and abundance, and record this information on a sketch map or Geographic Information System (GIS) map. Gain their Global Positioning System (GPS) locations when possible. Make the locations easy to find again by marking them with plastic flags. Monitor the locations through repeated visits and record progress or the lack of it. Agencies should map as many acres as possible with the dollars available before investing in unorganized treatments of extensive invasions, while new entries of severe invasives should be tackled early.
The search, survey, Inventory, monitor, and surveillance method — Using the four-option Search, Survey, Inventory, Monitor, and Surveillance method, hereafter referred to as SSIMS, will help you map, monitor, and track treatments with their results at several scales.
- The first SSIMS option is searching. Start by looking at the most likely points of entry, like along roads and especially near bridges, and record any occurrence of invasive plants you find in such areas. Then widen your search as time and resources permit.
- The second option is survey. Surveys are used to sample large areas where search procedures have found numerous infestationsthat are too many to inventory individually. Surveys are also used to examine large tracks when the amount of invasion is unknown and access is difficult. By systematically locating plots or by band sampling across the landscape, you can record cover or number of clumps to determine the extent of occupation and acres covered. For example, 21- by 21-foot plots represent 0.001 of an acre and can be evenly spaced across a stand of trees or area. Total the percent estimated cover or number of invasive stems counted per plot, divide these by the number of plots, and then multiple times 1,000 to gain an estimate of occupation for an average acre. An estimate for the entire area can be gained by multiplying the average times the number of acres in the surveyed area. By mapping the survey plot findings, areas of highest infestation density and multiple invasive species can be identified.
- The third option is an inventory followed by monitoring. Inventories are used to record the location and area of every infestation and the treatments that you apply. This is the best approach for individual land ownerships. Inventories can map individual patches and plants or circle them as a group when they occur in close proximity to one another. The GPS locations can be taken and mapped, or a sketch map made to plan the program of treatment and restoration. Monitoring requires revisits to inventoried points at scheduled times or resurveying tracks with scattered infestation to record and track treatment effectiveness and any further invasions.
- The fourth option in the SSIMS method is surveillance. A constant task for all those who work on and or otherwise use your land. Everyone should be alert for new infestations and know how to report these when and where sighted.
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Eradicate, control, or contain, and monitor results
You can eradicate an infestation by eliminating every invasive plant and its seeds in the infestation, a difficult feat that requires timely and repeated use of the most effective treatments. You can control or suppress an infestation through medium effective treatments that mostly kill aboveground plant parts but that leave, even with repeated treatments, the live roots or rhizomes unharmed. You can contain an infestation by confining and restricting its spread through effective treatments that eliminate outlier plants, spots, or advancing fronts. Containment is often the only option when infestations continue to encroach from adjoining untreated lands. Remember: all treatments should be monitored for determining followup actions.
Rehabilitate, restore, or reclaim treated lands
Rehabilitate, restore, or reclaim treated lands with resistant and resilient native or noninvasive plants. Critical to rehabilitating a site is promoting or planting desirable species that are as aggressive as the invasive species. Effective treatment schemes for rehabilitation use an integrated approach that combines treatments in an appropriate sequence and at crucial times.
