[APWG] Biological controls hopes instead of ecological restoration funding and inventing?

[craig at astreet.com]

Dear All,
Hoping that there are three Asiatic species
of rust are pathogens only on the genus Microstegium, that hope may keep
us from starting the process of  getting the tens of millions of
dollars together to pay for inventing the successful methods of converting
areas infested with that grass, and replacing it will a solid local native
understory.    
At the end of the day, nearly every square
mile in North America, including areas that are considered ecologically
pristine like Yellowstone Park, have had grazing damages in the past.
 That grazing damage has caused tatters in the native understory,
which then in turn, makes those areas vulnerable to new weed infestations
ready to fill those empty ecological niches.
The perennial grass
understory on the East Coast is so completely wiped out, as I saw when I
did native grass surveys in the Delaware-Virginia area and from Georgia to
Alabama, that it is like putting out a vacancy sign, for any new perennial
grass and other understory exotic to find a new home. Fort example in
Maryland, the only native grasses I saw were growing at the very edge of
the Great Falls in the park there. 
If we are going to get
serious, especially about these new understory weeds, we need to get the
tens to hundreds of millions of dollars of money necessary to get the job
started, and not hope for some magic biological fix that is funded by
others, because frankly those biological fixes generally have not worked
here in California, like against the Yellow Star thistle.  
On
a positive note, our extreme California and Western drought that is going
into its third year, may give us a lever we can use against the perennial
grass weeds, like the Harding grass, and also enable us to more easily
convert the annual weed areas back to as close to 100% local native cover,
like my project in Palo Alto, at
http://www.ecoseeds.com/arastradero.html.
Sincerely,  Craig
Dremann (650) 325-7333
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.plantconservation.org/pipermail/apwg_lists.plantconservation.org/attachments/20131228/4708ba95/attachment.html>