[RWG] Ecosystem Restoration, weed project Performance Standards Costs

[Craig Dremann - Redwood City Seed Company]

Dear Wayne and All,

Thanks for your email.  When I gave a talk to a Federal government
sponsored meeting in Monterey, that you can read at
http://www.ecoseeds.com/talk.html, I included a photo of the fastest
computer in the world in 1952-56, the Illiac-1, that had 5K of RAM and 64K
of memory, and cost million of dollars.

Today our cell phone has thousands of times that memory in the palm of our
hands that we are offered free when we sign up for a calling plan.

What I was suggesting in my talk, was that for weed management and
ecological restoration of areas like grasslands, we are still in the 
Illiac-1 days, with the processes still inefficient, costly, and nobody is
out measuring the performance standards yet for whatever we can currently
accomplish.

We need out agencies who are funding these projects, to go and find out in
non-riparian projects, what was actually accomplished, like for the $42
million Riverside K-rat preserve, or the thousands of miles of oil and gas
pipeline right-of-ways across the country, or the miles of highway
roadsides after new construction funded by our Federal government.

I agree that $1.5 million an acre that the USFWS is paying currently for
the Redwood City project seems steep, or even the $225,000 per acre that
Caltrans paid and still had 72% weed cover on their land after a decade of
work, also seems to be an outrageous price to pay.

One of the problems may be, is that neither Caltrans nor the USFWS ever
asked any ecological restoration professionals if they had any licensed
restoration technologies that could get the job done quicker or cheaper? 
They did not check with the professionals for these projects, and they
still have not done so, up to this morning for any other weed management
or restoration projects either.

However, back to calculations of costs for projects--just like calculating
the computer memory cost per Megabit of RAM, we could use the cost per
acre to get one more percentage of native plant cover as one measurement,
in a similar fashion?

There could be other measurements invented to evaluate our successes, but
at least a simple method to determine the cost to achieve one more
percentage of native cover, then we will be able to start talking about
those outrageous costs, similar to the cost of the Illiac-1 in its day?

Sincerely,  Craig Dremann (650) 325-7333