[APWG] We hear about exotics damages, but what are the total costs of repair?

[Marc Imlay]

If a country spends $100 million on parks and 30% of the acres
are lost to alien monocultures, the economic impact is $30 million.
For example, if New Jersey spends $10 million on 10,000 acres
of new parks and 30% of the acreage is lost to non-native
monocultures, the economic impact is $3 million.  How can we
incorporate this simple common sense viewpoint into the total costs
described below?


----- Original Message -----
From: "Craig Dremann" <craig at ecoseeds.com>
To: "Plant Conservation" <plant at plantconservation.org>;
<apwg at lists.plantconservation.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2004 6:24 PM
Subject: [APWG] We hear about exotics damages,but what are the total costs
of repair?


RE: We hear about the damages, but what are the total costs of repair?

Dear All,

There's always lots of talk about the annual damages that exotic plants
and exotic wild animals do each year.

However, has anyone calculated what the total costs would be to control
non-riparian wildland weeds in a particular area?

For example has a massive Florida Upland weed program: has any other
State or Federal program (like National Park Service land or BLM land)
made any calculations of the total costs for managing the non-riparian
(upland) weeds on public lands, and how many total acres would that
money repair?

The reason I'm asking, is that California's Dept.of Food and Agriculture
is in the beginning stages of putting together a State-wide exotic plant
management program, "California Noxious and Invasive Weed Action Plan",
but nobody's talking yet about the ultimate total cost to do ecosystem
repair on that kind of scale (150,000 sq. miles/375,000 sq. km, 2/3rd of
which are wildlands).

You can download the California plan as a 897 KB PDF file at
http://www.cdfa.ca.gov/phpps/ipc/noxweedinfo/pdfs/draft_weedplan.pdf

This is the Draft of the plan, and the State is asking for comments from
the public within the next few weeks.

I will be grateful for any total economic cost of weed management and/or
ecological restoration calculations that anyone have made.

Sincerely,  Craig Dremann, Redwood City, CA (650) 325-7333

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