[APWG] Perfomance Standards, Niches, Spatial Extinction and Wonders

[Craig Dremann - Redwood City Seed Company]

Dear Wayne and All,

Thanks for very much your detailed replies, and I really appreciate the
time you have taken to make all of your comments.

I did not comment on all of your previous points, to allow others to
comment on our discussions.  I feel that we are discussing so many
interesting  aspects of weed management and ecological restoration, that
perhaps breaking it into several separate topics might be useful?

For example, up to now, PERFORMANCE STANDARDS for non-riparian
professional ecological restoration, has been largely absent, because
nobody has been willing to spend the time or massive amounts of money
necessary to invent the technologies that can consistently get you a very
low percentage of weed cover and a high percentage of self-sustainable
local native plant cover within six months or less.

Instead of Federal and State agencies taking the lowest bids for
restoration projects, perhaps it might be better to review the available
licensed ecological restoration technologies for a project, in small scale
test plots first?

Hire a half dozen or dozen potential restoration companies to set up small
scale test plots on the future project site, a year or two in advance of
the big project? Then, you could give each company’s restoration
technologies a test drive?

And expect to have to pay for a license to be able to use the most
successful restoration technologies for the big project, that the
successful technologies are not free, or bundled with either the test
plots or the big project itself.

I learned from Ken Kolence, who in 1967 was the first person to license a
software program ever, that successful technologies have value in
themselves and should be licensed.  Ever since Ken started the license
concept in Silicon Valley the 1960s, every single software program or
computer operating system written, even the free or shareware programs,
are licensed.

Regarding NICHES, for the non-riparian understory, especially in the arid
West--ecosystems are like a cake recipe, with ingredients in certain
proportions in relationship with each other.

That is one very important thing I had to invent as I went along after
observing and measuring hundreds of plant interactions.  How do you
determine what is missing from the recipe, and what do you add, in what
amounts, to help the recipe balance out at the end of the day?

I call it the Species Threshold test, and it is an interactive balancing
act that each species does when growing together as a group.  So when you
add 25% more cover of Nassella pulchra, what does that do to the
percentage cover of the weedy yellow star thistle, for example?

Or how many cups of Bluebunch wheatgrass seed to do have add per acre, so
that the weedy cheatgrass completely goes away as an ingredient, like in
my pictures at http://www.ecoseeds.com/greatbasin.html.

The niche is the spot in the recipe for each plant family, that make up
the total ingredients for a local native ecosystem.  So the common
families in central California that are important ingredient in the
recipe, are grasses, sunflower family, lily family, bean family Indian
paintbrush family, miners lettuce family, mint family, etc.

Whenever the right amounts of the native ingredients absent or are not
adequate in the recipe, that is a spot where the exotics can substitute
themselves into the ecosystem recipe.

That is where SPATIAL EXTINCTION comes in.

The concept of extinction has been from a European perspective so far, to
mean that a species has to be wiped off the entire face of the planet,
usually from our ecological misdeeds in the past, like Martha the
Passenger pigeon on September 1, 1914, or the Xerces Blue butterfly that
used to live in the sand dunes of San Francisco in 1941.  That the word
extinction is only considered when it is on a planetary scale.

However, I am suggesting using the words Spatial Extinction to mean
extinction on a teeny-tiny-micro-scale--on the scale of square millimeter
by square millimeter.  Basically, the ground where a single weed plant
sprouts and grows.  that the occupying of that space causes the extinction
of the native plant or plants that used to grow there, on that particular
spot.

Spatial extinction on a massive scale has happened in all of our
non-riparian areas below 3,000 feet elevation nationwide, so that our
native grasses and native forbs are greater than 50% extinct overall, and
in some places like California, 99% extinct.

That is one of the most important aspects of our new Anthropocene geologic
era that we are living in, that spatial extinction on a continent-wide
scale can only be reversed by human actions.   Once you allow your
ecosystems to get below 50% native grass and forb cover, like in
California and most of the West, it cannot recover on its own.

These ecosystems and the species like the Riverside County Krats that need
to live within them, need us humans to learn how to restore them to high
quality standards, quickly, gently and efficiently, so those native
species can survive.  It is a life and death issue for them.

THERE ARE WONDERS YOU WILL SEE, at the 50% native cover threshold and the
95%+ native cover.  When you get though that 50% native cover threshold,
it is like seeing the outline of the ruins of the vanished ecosystem come
back to life.  But when you get over the 95% threshold, then everything
changes, because like a ruined city, you not only have rebuilt the
buildings, but you have put a coat of paint back on them too.

For example, Shaw says that managing a 95% native ecosystem for diversity
is more difficult than managing the weeds to get there in the first place.
 There are probably so few examples of managing non-riparian weeds back to
5% or less cover, that to also want to manage for native diversity in your
ecosystem, is another higher level of restoration, that really boggles the
mind.

Wayne, I always enjoy your comments, and hope that others feel like
commenting on whatever parts of our discussions, that they feel are
important.

Sincerely,  Craig Dremann  (650) 325-7333