[APWG] 30 Steps to get 99.5% weed free, plus the 100 paces to get there

Wed Apr 4 10:16:22 CDT 2012

Dear Wayne and John,

Thanks for your emails.

30 STEPS TO GET 99.5% WEED FREE
I apologize if it seems that I repeated several of the 30 steps like John
is pointing out, but if you have ever working on California grasslands,
you know that each of those Steps 1, 2, 3 and 4 were necessary as
individual Steps.

And any project that you are going to invest any time or money into,
should have Steps 5 & 6 as givens, because everyone should start with a
weeding or restoration program that had very high (99.5% weed-free in 180
days or less) Performance Standards supporting them.

CHECK PERFORMANCE STANDARDS.
 And you ALWAYS test whatever technologies you are going to use, with the
small scale test plots first, before you proceed to the larger project. 
Most people assume that their weeding or restoration is going to work,
but never test it on a small scale first, to check its performance
standards--like giving it a test drive.

If you desire those high quality standards, and cannot find them for free
in the literature or do not want to license them from other companies, you
need to invest the time and money to invent them yourself.

This idea of licensing technologies for weeding projects or for ecological
restoration Projects, I admit is a very new one that I first suggested in
my 2001 article in Ecological Restoration, “Do Ecological Restorationists
Fail to See Themselves as Inventors or Innovators?"

You can spend a lot of time, like in the case of the tarweed flats in
Franklin Basin in Idaho,  where three generations of researchers worked
for 100 years, never made a dent in that default native plant that is
solidly widespread across the Rockies.

Or, without performance standards, you can spend a lot of time AND money,
like the $225,000 per acre, and end up with 72% weed cover after a decade
of work, like Caltrans did with I-505.

100 PACES TOE-POINTED-- KEEP IT SIMPLE, AND ANY DATA IS 24K GOLD
The Evans & Love (1957) toe-point vegetation cover transect is very
simple--just start at a particular place and walk in a straight line and
every time you take a step, you write down what plant your toe touches.
You do not need to make any notches in your boots--just note what kind of
plant the toe of your shoe touches.

It is just a simple snapshot of what was growing on a site on a particular
day in time.  The toe-point is not for gathering data for a PhD
thesis--just gathering a sample of what was growing on a spot in time--for
the weeds, the wildflowers and the native grasses--if you are working in a
grasslands habitat for example.

Whatever vegetation cover information you gather, no matter how crude, is
worth its weight in 24K gold, because that is a measurement for a spot on
a particular date.    And ANY bit of vegetation cover data you collect, no
matter how crude, is going to be the very best information we will have
available for that spot for that date in time.

I wish someone like John Muir had done some toe-points in California
grasslands in the 1800s before the 1,000+ weeds came to California and 99%
blanketed our State, but grasslands ecology was only invented by Arthur
“Sammy” Sampson 100 years ago in 1912 in the United States.  And the
toe-point was not invented until 1957 by Evans and Love.

However,  today we can improve on the science of ecology and vegetation
cover measurements invented by the elders, and make our own improvements,
to get to that 99.5% weed-free cover that I have been talking about.

If you look at the photos at http://www.ecoseeds.com/WMA.html, you can see
how nice the Shaw and Mark's properties look, compared to the POST 100%
harding grass property for example, and it does not take any vegetation
transects of any kind, to see that there is something different going on
between those three photos?

Anyone on this list doing either weed management or non-riparian
restoration, should do annual cover measurements, so you can have annual
benchmarks for your work, and be able to see trends.

If you try out the 30 Steps that I outline at
http://www.ecoseeds.com/grass.yes.html, your changes towards a weed-free
environment should be so rapid and dramatic, that you should be able to do
the Bob Dylan transect--which is a version of  “You don’t need a
Weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

After seeing Mark Vande Pol’s and Shaw’s places last year, nobody on this
list should ever be satisfied with less than 99.5% weed-free grasslands or
forest understory for any project you work on--plus I do not believe that
anyone needs to take more than two years to get there, now we all know
that it can be done.

If anyone tries my 30 Steps to get 99.5% weed-free habitats, please let me
know what your results are.

Sincerely,  Craig Dremann  (650) 325-7333