[APWG] Four rules that I use, for best weed management

[Craig Dremann - Redwood City Seed Company]

Dear All,

John wrote: I would love detailed information on best practices for
invasives control for land managers.

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After 35 years of doing this kind of work, I live by four rules for best
weed management, that might be helpful in your work also:

RULE 1.) What is the WVL™ or Weed Vulnerability Level™ of the ecosystem
understory that you are working in?

This calculation establishes the starting baseline of the ecosystem you
are working within, with +100 being the most resistant to weed invasions,
and minus 200 an ecological vacuum for new exotics to continually
colonize.

By starting with this WVL™ measurement, you find out how far you have to
go, to finally finish the weed management/restoration job on a particular
site.

The WVL™ measurement is based on the percentage of perennial native grass
cover, with 1 to 100 percent is translated to +1 to +100 on the scale. If
no original native grasses exist, nor any exotics present yet = minus 100.
No original native grasses, but exotics planted or colonizing = minus 200.

RULE 2.) Is conversion back to the original local native understory, a
major goal of your exotic plant management?

If restoration of the original native ecosystem understory is not at least
51% of what you are doing out there, then make it 51% or more of the
effort.

RULE 3.) Are you doing dozens and dozens of test plots and science each year?

If test plots are not at least 25% of the effort in managing exotics and
restoring the original native understory, then it should be.

Small scale test plots are key to future successes and inventing
efficiencies.  Trying out dozens of different approaches to the problem of
both managing exotics, as well as restoring the local native understory at
the same time, will be an enormous help in guiding the larger effort in
the most efficient manner.

My saying is that, “If the process does not work on a square yard, it will
not work on 100 acres.”  It is better to waste time and effort on 100
different treatments in square-yard plots, than betting on the success of
a single treatment for a 100 acre project.

RULE 4.) Are you working on inventing the most efficient wildlands weed
management methods, for non-riparian areas, and is society going to start
funding those innovations?

Be aware at the end of the day, that the most efficient wildlands weed
management and wildlands non-riparian ecological restoration methods, have
not been invented yet, and will probably not be invented for 100 years or
more, or at least until there is a significant annual economic need, for
efficient methods to be invented.

Weed management and ecological restoration by themselves, are never going
to get enough funding by themselves, to fund the necessary invention and
innovations to make those efforts more efficient.

There must be an over-riding reason why society needs to fund the hundreds
of millions and billions of dollars of innovations in weed management and
ecological restoration that are currently needed in North America.

For example, a good reason might be, that without a thriving native plant
understory in the arid West, exotics will kill off what is left of your
ecosystems through wildfires, and your annual rainfall might start sharply
decreasing?

You can read more about these issue at http://www.ecoseeds.com/talk.html
http://www.ecoseeds.com/invent.html and http://www.ecoseeds.com/Saudi.html

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