[APWG] Restoring 100% natives makes weed management look differently

[Craig Dremann - Redwood City Seed Company]

Dear Wayne and All,

I think the important perspective, once you have done a complete R & R of
an ecosystem, Removal of the weeds and Restoration of the natives,  that
it puts the whole weed issue in a completely different light.

If you look at my 1997 Megatransect through the West, it appears that
there's not much left of the native understory to work with, once you have
completely managed the weeds, at http://www.ecoseeds.com/megatransect.html

The percentage of native understory cover that is left varies from State
to State, and I would be very interested if there have been any
Megatransects like what I did, done back East or in the Midwest?:

California <5,000 ft. elevation: <0.1%
Southern Idaho: 6%
Utah: 32%
Nevada: 34%
Wyoming, South Dakota, Colo.: 40-44%

However, if there are stilol dormant native seeds in the soil, underneath
the exotics to work with, that makes the job so much easier.

What was important on the Shaw property, when I first looked at it in
1992, what to try and determine what natives should be, and where should
they be on the property, once the exotics were managed.  The goal was not
just to manage weeds, but to put back in place, the original native
ecosystem understory, which is what Shaw has achieved.

It is like being an Ecosystem Archaeologist, finding little bits of a
ruined ecosystem, and trying to use those relic ruins as a blueprint for
rebuilding it.

For example, we only found five individual Danthonia grass plants in the
5-acre valley floor on the Shaw property in 1992, but that gave us a clue
that at one time, 100-200 years ago, that valley may have been more or
less solid Danthonia.

There is a photo that I took of Michael Shaw lying on a resurrected plant
on the cover of the June 2002 issue of Ecological Restoration, and now
Danthonia has regrown from the dormant seeds in the soil seedbank, to
become common in the valley again.

In the future, as we try to make the effort and the investments necessary
to restore more and more native understories, Ecosystem Archaeology may
become a profession in itself, to help guide us towards a finished
self-sustaining weed-free ecosystem.

And we are going to need another profession, to guide us towards recreate
the species balances that occurred in the original native ecosystems, a
way to determine Original Native Species Percentages.

Sincerely,  Craig Dremann (650) 325-7333