[APWG] Careful measurements of species cover & Performance standards

[Craig Dremann - Redwood City Seed Company]

Dear Tony, Wayne  and All,

Before setting up your test plots, get very careful vegetation cover
measurements, and that may give you some clues on what species can fight
the Cereal rye best.

Like the petri dish pic at http://www.ecoseeds.com/mrsa.jpg -- you might
find hidden amongst the weeds, some natives as individual plants or small
groups of plants, that are successfully keeping the weeds at a distance,
like the disks at 5 and 11 o'clock, where you see rings of antibiosis
circling the two disks?

For crude plant cover measure-detail, I use a toe-point line transect when
I want to get plus or minus 1% cover for a species.  But for my more
detailed work, I use a belt-line transect, where I can get down to 1/100th
to 1/1000th of a percent overall cover, like when I studied the Benicia
Prairie,  and the transect design is at
http://www.ecoseeds.com/transect.html.

The native plant, Blue Eyed Grass, was very rare,  appearing for a single
year at Benicia, and for the whole area, only made up 0.004% of the
overall plant cover.

Sometimes the worst weeds at Benicia, were measured at a very low, almost
unnoticed  0.5% cover, but the process they started, is chaos within the
native ecosystem, which is what I talk about in the conclusion of the
Benicia Prairie study, at http://www.ecoseeds.com/juicy.gossip.ten.html

You may have to set up at least two different sets of Tiny Test plots in
different habitats.

You may have to set up one set, for example in open grasslands, and
another at the edge of forests or shrubs, because in general, different
mixes of native species live in those two different habitats.

If you imagine converting the land from solid weeds back to solid native,
you can look at the project as one big giant landscape painting, and
instead of painting on a canvas, you are painting back directly onto the
land.

Nobody should be the least bit concerned or afraid of converting large
tracts of land,  100% back to natives -- I see absolutely no problem at
all, as long as we are all working with local genetic material.

The idea is to put a 100% coat of native cover primer back on the canvas,
and then the other natives as least will not have to contend with any
weeds, as the local natives can find their own historic, original, and
rightful place within the ecosystem.

Our most important first goal for weed management in North America, needs
to be high quality Performance Standards for our work, like 100% native
cover and zero weeds, within 90 days or less, like my web page talks about
at http://www.ecoseeds.com/standards.html

And, in the very near future, there needs to be a solid economic reason
that society can agree on, for funding this work with some serious annual
budgets -- Why do we need to convert these wildland weedy areas, back to
solid natives?

Sincerely,  Craig Dremann (650) 325-7333