Phragmites (Common Reed) Success Through Collaboration Since at least the 1960s, a European species of common reed (Phragmites australis) has hidden, seemingly benign, among native reed species in Nebraska’s Platte River Basin. But a drought in the early 2000s left many channels dry, and the exotic species began to thrive (above left) before channels were cleared (below) by herbicides. “We were kind of asleep on this one,” says Rich Walters, coordinator of Nebraska’s Platte Valley Weed Management Area (PVWMA) and Implementation and Evaluation Coordinator for The Nature Conservancy. “In six years we went from barely noticing it to it dominating the channels.” The plant spreads as quickly as five feet per year and grows up to 19 feet tall, forming dense stands that crowd native plants, repel wildlife, and clog river flow. After Phragmites was removed from the nearby Republican River, its flow rate increased 400 percent, according to Mitch Coffin, manager of the Nebraska Department of Agriculture’s (NDA) Animal and Plant Health Protection Noxious Weed Program.
Credit: Rich Walters/The Nature Conservancy
In 2008, armed with NDA funding, Walters led a multi-agency effort to reclaim 336 miles of the Platte River. He built partnerships and coordinated Phragmites removal by some 700 landowners plus state and federal weed management and natural resource agencies. Between 2008 and 2011, they used helicopters to locate and spray nearly 19,000 acres of monotypic Phragmites stands with Imazapyr, an herbicide deemed safe for aquatic habitats. The spraying is so precise that “we can kill a Phragmites stand and not affect a willow a foot away,” Walters says. Some 90 percent of the $2.5 million project budget has been spent on herbicide application and removal of dead Phragmites stems. Now the effort is transitioning into long-term monitoring and maintenance, with landowners playing a key role. Walters considers Phragmites on the Platte River to be under control, though he believes it will never be eradicated. Before treatment, the only wildlife he saw using Phragmites stands were white-tailed deer in search of a hiding place. “The birds wouldn’t even nest in it,” he says. Because the Platte is a major migratory staging area for the Central Flyway, that was a big concern. But now, Walters has seen wildlife return to treated areas, and native annual plants growing on sandbars and riverbanks. “It’s a good story because we got on top of it,” he says. “But it’s a sad story because we let it get that bad.”
Credit: Rich Walters/The Nature Conservancy
vital. Management treatments need to surpass an invader’s ability to spread, but with limited budgets, resource managers must evaluate the economic and environmental costs of doing a little (and perhaps wasting money) versus doing enough to make a difference. That calculation often leads to sticker shock. For example, a report by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection (MDEP) notes that all New England states as well as 41 other states and six Canadian provinces are battling Eurasian watermilfoil, water chestnut, zebra mussels, and other waterborne invasives at a cost ranging from $200 to $2,000 per lake acre per year—with no end in sight. Vermont alone spends more than $200,000 annually
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The Wildlife Professional, Summer 2012
—By Jessica P. Johnson
just on the staff who manage invasives at 46 of the state’s 285 larger lakes. In their book Fading Forests II: Trading Away North America’s Natural Heritage, authors Faith Campbell and Scott Schlarbaum note that “public agencies have already spent tens of millions of dollars attempting to eradicate just one of several recently introduced pests—the Asian long-horned beetle.” But if that beetle thwarts containment efforts, they write, “it will cost an estimated $600 billion to replace city trees killed” by the bug, along with additional losses from declines in tourism, maple syrup sales, and timber production (Campbell and Schlarbaum 2002).
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