[RWG] Computer program to reconstruct a weed-free, original ecosystem?

[Craig Dremann - Redwood City Seed Company]

Dear All,

Using that $1.5 million/acre USFWS funded Thornmint recovery project in
Redwood City as an example.    I am wondering if anyone has ever thought
about writing a computer program that could reconstruct the Thornmint
plant community that existed in pre-weed times?

I did for the Benicia Prairie that I was studying for a decade in the
1990s, that you can read about at
http://www.ecoseeds.com/juicy.gossip.ten.html and got some help with some
important concepts from Ken Kolence who wrote the first licensed software
in Silicon Valley in 1967, a program we still use, the disk
defragmentation program.

What the idea is, to have the computer program calculate for you in terms
of percentage cover, how many percentage cover of Thornmints you should
see, and how many percentage cover of every other native species should be
growing around the Thornmints?

That is one of the problems with Shaw 74 acres and Mark’s 14 acres with
their 95-99.5% native cover results, is that neither of their ecosystems
have not been analyzed for missing native species, that help hold the
ecosystems intact against the exotics from re-invading.

Especially at Shaw’s, you can quickly see, even without a computer program
to alert you, that part of the 5% missing are the native clovers that are
extinct on the 74 acres, plus the summer tarweeds and Heterothecas are not
there any more.

I hope that everyone agrees, that unless we want either our weeding
projects or our ecological restoration projects, to break down to
continuous weeding projects that go on to infinity, we need to write
computer programs to analyze what we need to see at the end of the day, in
terms of native plant cover, with the correct species mix that would be
able to withstand future weed invasions?

Sincerely,  Craig Dremann (650) 325-7333