- Today, we're going to be talking about
a number of things.
So, first we're gonna start talking about
kind of the distinction between what is a basic plant
versus a weed?
Because a lot of time, those terms get used interchangeably.
Why are they a problem?
And then, we're gonna go through and actually look
at some of those plants to help you make sure you can
identify some of them.
And we're both, the things that are weedy plants that come
into your garden, or weedy plants that maybe if you
have some land.
Maybe you have a 40 acre parcel.
You have a wood lot.
You have a prairie.
Maybe you have a wetland.
Some of those species.
And then, garden plants that become invasive.
So, a lot of our plants that are invasive in our natural
areas come from our gardens.
And so, we're gonna let you know about those so that
if you have those in your property, maybe you might want
to start thinking about getting rid of some of 'em.
Then, we're gonna be talking about control methods,
what you can use to control some of these.
And then, we're gonna finish up with some information
about earthworms.
And you may have heard some things about earthworms
lately, and we'll talk to you about why they're not
always so great.
So, starting off with weeds.
Most people think about plants that aren't wanted as
being weeds.
And so, weeds, from an ecologist perspective, they tend
to be the species that are undesirable and tend to grow
in disturbed areas, crops, you're yard, kind of green
spaces that are unmanaged.
And they can cause a lot of impacts.
But ecologists tend to think of invasive plants as the ones
that actually invade into natural areas.
So, into our forests, our wood lots, into our wet lands,
into the lakes, and grasslands.
And so, these are the ones that cause, and they may cause
economic harm, but they also cause ecological harm
in those areas.
And we'll go through some of those ecological harms
that they cause.
So,some of you are familiar with garlic mustard.
And that's the plant on the left here.
And garlic mustard is a really common invasive plant.
And so, it's one that many, many of us have had to deal with
in our own yards.
If you do any volunteer work in any kind of a local park
or local natural area, you've probably been managing
garlic mustard.
Very easy to identify.
The first year, it just has small basal rosettes.
And second year, it send up these flowering stalks
that then can actually, well, will send, very quickly
will produce these four petaled white flowers.
And if you crush the leaves or any part of it, it smells
like garlic.
And so, it's really easy to identify.
And garlic mustard, if you let it go to seed, those seeds
will be in the ground and will be germinated over the next
10 to 15 years.
Most of them will germinate in the first couple years,
but you'll still have a few that are germinating for awhile.
So, it's really important with a species like this when it
first comes in to your property to get it out.
Don't let it go to seed.
If you've already been having it going to seed for a number
of years, then you need to really think about if you're
gonna be willing to take on the control that it takes
to get rid of it.
'Cause that means you're gonna be having to go back
and monitor and control every single year for the next
10 to 15 years.
And so, you really want to think about it if you have
the capacity to do that and if it's really something
that is important to you.
So, what happens with a species like this is they go from
just one plant gets in.
One seed gets established somehow, a squirrel, a raccoon,
or your shoes bring a seed in, gets established in
the middle of this patch of wild flowers.
Like here, you can see that one little garlic mustard plant.
And then, very quickly, it goes, in just a few years,
it can go to a complete understory of garlic mustard
and completely outcompeting all those native wild flowers.
And so, this is something that's really important that
if you don't want to have a sea of an invasive plant
like garlic mustard, then you really want to be able to
get it under control pretty quickly.
While we're on garlic mustard, I'll just mention that this
plant actually is allelopathic, so it actually produces
a chemical in its roots that can kill not only other
herbaceous plants that are smaller than it, but it also
can kill the mycorrhizal fungi the tree roots need
to order to absorb nutrients.
And so, mature trees that have garlic mustard growing around
them are being compromised by the garlic mustard itself,
even though it's only this tiny little plant compared
to a big mature tree.
And so, there's a lot of things that these plants cause
that aren't necessarily really obvious.
So, how do we know if I've got an invasive plant, or not?
So, there's a number of things you can do to try to
figure out if something is invasive.
Of course, identification is an important part of that.
And but first look, does it look like it's really spreading
quickly in your property?
And is it kind of eliminating other species?
And is it dominating the site if that last photo looked
like it was clearly dominating the site?
You get a plant like that, you've got something that's
invasive.
And then, finding out what it is.
And then, find out is it known to be invasive somewhere else?
There's lots and lots of websites, and I'll show you
some later, that can tell you if something's gonna be
is known to be invasive.
And you may have something that hasn't been really reported
to be invasive elsewhere but maybe is for you.
And that's important to let us know if you run across
things like that.
So, there's a number of characteristics in a plant
that makes something invasive.
And we have thousands and thousands of plants
that have been introduced in North America,
from Europe, and from Asia, other parts of the world.
However, only a small percentage of those actually have
become invasive.
And it's those particular plants that have the ability
to do these kind of things where they grow and reproduce
very rapidly, both by seed and oftentimes vegetatively.
They may have rhizomes, or runners, or some other form
of reproduction, or some form that allows them to reproduce
very quickly.
They can out-compete other species by doing things
like secreting those toxins in the soil,
like garlic mustard does.
Or, things like buckthorn and honeysuckle are two really
common invasive shrubs around here.
They both leaf out really early and hold their leaves on
really late.
And so, when they're leafed out early in the spring,
that's normally the time for woodland wild flowers
to be able to bloom and to grow before the trees put on
their leaves.
Well, then, all of a sudden, you've got honeysuckle
and buckthorn in there, and they are now all leafed out.
And the wild flowers below them no longer can get that sun,
that little window peer of sun that they get in the spring.
They also can have ability to use excess nutrients.
So, invasive plants tend to like a lot of high nutrients,
things like sediments, and high nitrogen.
And so, when we have a lot of run-off from an urban area,
or from farm fields or something like that, we tend to get
a lot more of these invasive plants.
If you've ever put in a prairie, then you've been told
do not fertilize.
Prairie plants don't need additional fertilizer.
They actually do better if it's a little lower fertility
because the weeds do better with the higher fertility.
And so, these plants have that ability to take up those
excess nutrients.
And one of the big ones is that when these plants were
introduced here, so when people came over from the 1600s
through now, and they brought plants with them, they didn't
bring, generally, they didn't bring the soil.
And they generally didn't bring the insects that came along
with them.
You're not allowed to bring insects into this country.
But plants are introduced all the time.
And so, the insects that kept these things in check
back in Europe or back in Asia are not here.
And so, most of these plants, middle of the summer,
you can go out and look at a Norway maple leaf,
or a garlic mustard leaf, or a honeysuckle leaf.
And there's almost nothing that's eaten it.
Whereas if you look at the leaves of some of our native
plants, they're all chewed up.
There's lot of things that have been eating 'em because
that's the way they'd evolve with these other critters
that have fed on them.
And so, there's some big difference between our natives
and our non-natives.
And so, there's a lot of impacts that are happening by those
invasive plants.
The most obvious is that they display certain native
vegetation.
They also will limit tree regeneration.
So, when you have a dense shade being produced by
honeysuckle or some other shrub, the seedlings of the native
trees have a really hard time growing.
It alters the soil nutrients.
It actually was something like buckthorn.
It had this very high nitrogen.
And the nitrogen breaks down very quickly, as opposed
to like oak trees where they're very high carbon.
And oak leaves will lay on your ground for several years
before they're completely broken down.
But with buckthorn, in a few months, those leaves are
completely gone.
Either the worms have eaten 'em up,
or they've just decomposed.
And so, they've cycled that nitrogen very quickly.
It also degrades on a wild life habitat.
And a lot of, especially, are invertebrates are very
specific about the native species that they actually
live on.
Most of our invertebrates only have a few host plants
that they actually survive on.
And so, when we lose those host plants, we also lose
that wildlife.
And for the most part, a lot of our native ecosystems,
we have very few remnant native ecosystems left
in North America.
We used to be mostly prairie and oak savanna in this part
of Southern Wisconsin.
And we now have like less than 1/8th of 1% of each prairies
and oak savannas.
And those tiny little remnants that are left, we're having
to constantly battle against the invasive species that are
trying to get in there and are impacting those.
So, I'm just gonna show you a couple of these species
as we go through.
Here's a great example of buckthorn leafing out early
and shading out everything below it.
And there's several species of European buckthorn,
and most of them look very much alike.
We have a relatively new one that's come in from Asia
that has a little bit shinier, longer leaves that looks
a little bit different, but they all act about the same.
And they basically get in that five to 15 foot range
of height.
They cause really dense stands underneath the forest.
And they have very fragrant flowers in the spring.
And then, the fruits are eaten by the birds.
And so, the birds spread these fruits around.
So, one of the things that these things do is that
because they leaf out early, then birds that want to nest
will come and nest in it and in the honeysuckle because
they realize that there's good cover there.
But because the formation of the honeysuckle, they're
fairly short, and so the actual crotches where they
can build their nest are fairly low.
And so, they have very high predation rates there.
So, they have very high predation rates, and so they end up
losing most of their eggs and most of their nestlings
because of that.
Common buckthorn, another one that's super common
around here.
A lot of you may have buckthorn that you're having to
deal with.
Very shiny, oval leaves with very small serrations on it.
It's dioecious, meaning that there's male plants and female plants.
So, the female plants produce these black berries.
And these berries actually have a chemical in them
that's used as a laxative.
That's why it was introduced to this country as a medicinal
plant.
It's scientific name is Rhamnus cathartica.
And cathartic means a laxative.
And so, the birds eat this, and then they have diarrhea.
And so, that's if you have ever had your car covered with
bird poop, you probably have buckthorn nearby.
And then, they also, I mentioned that leaving in that
nitrogen.
And they can grow up very quickly.
This is a forested area where they did a timber cut,
and they took out the larger trees.
And there was glossy buckthorn in the understory.
And it just exploded.
And so none of the trees can get established now.
So, one of the other things about native versus non-native
trees and shrubs is that that you remember we talked about
invertebrates and other arthropods, meaning spiders
and other things like that that feed on those native
species.
So, when you have a diversity and abundance of species
in the understory of a forest, then you're going to have
a lot more birds than can be supported by that.
As opposed, like an oak tree supports many, many more
types of species than a Norway maple, for example.
Whereas if you have a big stand of buckthorn, there's very
little that lives in there.
And if you look at butterfly use of some of these plants,
in general, they've done some studies, and they've looked at
what butterflies use of native plants versus non-native
plants.
And then you can see that the caterpillars much prefer
native plants to feed on instead of the non-natives.
Economic impacts of some of these species can be really
important.
Forest production has been a big problem in this state.
When you have situations like that buckhorn taking over
when you do a timber sale.
And all of a sudden, you don't have any trees coming up,
you just have these invasives coming up.
Big problem.
A lot of these species are also a problem in agriculture.
Canada thistle, for example, big problem both in agriculture
and in natural areas.
Some of them cause a lot of shoreline damage.
And I'll show you a Japanese knotweed in a few slides here
and what it can do to shorelines.
They can reduce your property values.
And it's just really hard to hike through these areas
when you've got these dense stands, and you can't even get
through 'em.
And some of these plants are actually toxic as well.
So, we'll talk about a few of those.
Japanese knotweed, some of you may have had Japanese
knotweed, and you may be battling with it right now.
It's a plant that has very heart-shaped leaves.
It's pretty distinctive.
It can get about 15 feet high.
And it grows from that height every year.
It dies back every winter, and then comes back up
from shoots.
And this plant evolved in Japan on volcanoes.
And so, it's niche is to come back in after there's been
a volcano.
And so, it has this great root system underground,
and it can poke through things like lava and concrete.
And so, you have situations like this where it just
pops right in through.
And so, it actually goes into the foundations of building
really easily, especially if people have planted this as
a landscape foundation planting.
And so, it's a problem in buildings, but it's also a big
problem ecologically, especially when it gets into shores.
And so, this is really typical of a lot of the rivers
in the New England area where it gets established just by
a root fragment will float downstream, get established,
and within a few years you have this huge colony.
This is actually clonal, so this is actually one plant.
And it spreads vegetatively and just completely dominates
the shoreline.
And then, in the winter, it dies back because it's
a perennial, but it only stays alive underneath the ground.
And so, then you get a lot of erosion.
So, big problem species, really difficult one for people
to control.
Parsnip is very different.
It grows in our grasslands.
And this is one that will burn you.
Anybody in here ever gotten burned by parsnip?
Yeah.
If you've been burned by parsnip, then you know it.
A lot of people think they got poison ivy, but the doctor
says this doesn't really look like poison ivy.
Because it's actually a physical burn.
So, when the sap of the poison ivy gets on your skin,
like in this case, it probably just like
it scraped across the guys leg.
And then, it's exposed to sunlight.
Then, you get this intense burn.
And it's not an allergy like poison ivy is, so everybody's
vulnerable to this.
And so, this plant is really common in a lot of our
grasslands, and it's fairly easy to control by mowing
or by hand pulling, but you have to know what it is.
And you have to get it before it goes to seed.
And if you mow it when it's in this stage here,
that's great.
If you wait 'til it's got brown seeds on it, you're just
spreading those seeds around.
Okay.
Another real problem that we found about recently is that
some of these invasive plants actually increase
the abundance of some tick-born diseases.
So, we know Lyme disease is a huge problem here
in Wisconsin.
Probably one of the worst places for Lyme disease.
And it's moved by ticks.
And we also have several other tick-born diseases,
like ehrlichiosis and several others now.
And the tick and the disease is actually hosted by
rodents, which really like these very dense shrubby places.
And so, when you have a dense stand of barberry
or of honeysuckle, then it increases the number of
those reservoirs, and then it increases the abundance
of ticks with Lyme disease.
So, getting rid of those will help reduce your chance of
getting Lyme disease.
I do want to cover very quickly the regulations related
to invasive species.
And for a number of years when I've gone and give talks
like this and people have said, well, why do we still allow
these things to be sold?
And so, we finally got legislative authority to actually
develop a law about this.
And so, we developed a rule.
And in 2009, we actually got it in place.
And then, a few years ago, we started working on revising
that rule.
Because in the first round, we very purposely didn't put
all the species in it that we knew we eventually
would want to regulate.
We wanted to give people a chance to get used to the new law.
And so, now we have the second group of species are
in there.
So, there's two regulated categories, the prohibited
category, and the restricted category.
So, the prohibited category are those that either are not
here yet as far as we know, or they're only in a few locations.
And we think that there's a potential that we can actually
eradicate them.
So, one that we really want, wherever they're found,
we want people to help us.
Let us know, so we can get rid of them.
So, they don't spread into everybody else's property.
The restricted species are the ones we've already been
talking about, the ones that are already widespread
and that really realistically we can not eradicate them
statewide.
You may be able to eradicate them on your own property,
or you may be able to get rid of them on your property.
But state-wide, they're just too abundant.
And then, we have a couple other categories as well.
There's a caution category of ones that we think these
are gonna be a big problem in the future,
or they could be a big problem.
But we don't know enough yet.
And so, something that we're letting people know, probably
better off not to be using these.
And then, we also have a non-restricted category.
These are things that they're already so wide spread,
things like Creeping Charlie.
There's not much we can do to minimize the spread of it.
So, we're just not gonna restrict it.
So, prohibited species, real important that if you find
prohibited species, or you think you might have found
a prohibited species, let us know.
And ideally, you should either take a photo of it, that you
can send us a photo or get a voucher specimen and send us
a voucher specimen.
Put it in the mail.
Send it to me, and we'll figure out what it is.
And give us, of course, the location information as well.
And so, provide us the information that we need so that
we can then figure out if that's what it is, and then
we can work with whoever the land owner is to actually
work on getting it removed.
So, the best way to send that in by email would be through
this email address.
And that's for any kind of invasive species that you
might find.
And then, then we'll follow up and work with people
to try to get control.
So, the actual regulations on these categories are
fairly similar for both the prohibited and the restricted
species.
There's one big difference on the two of them
that'll cover it.
So, for both species, you can't transport them, which means
moving 'em around.
You can't transfer them, meaning buy them, sell them,
you know, give them away.
And you can't introduce them.
With plants that would be planting them out on
the landscape.
The big difference between these two species is the word
possession.
If you happen to possess a buckthorn on your property,
then we're not gonna tell you that you have to get rid of it.
It'd be great if you did get rid of it,
but we're not gonna require it.
But if you possess a kudzu, you're the first person
in the state that we find kudzu in and it just happens
to be on your property, we're gonna work with you to try
and get rid of that.
We don't want you to keep that kudzu because it will then
spread from your property to your neighbors property,
and the birds are gonna move it around.
And pretty soon we're gonna have a big problem.
So, these regulations are in place for all of those species.
We do have a few exemptions that are in place to help
make it more feasible for people.
So, if you're a volunteer working on a local park and you're
doing a garlic mustard pull, you can transfer these things
around, but you can transport them for the purpose of
disposing them, or identifying them, or controlling them.
You also might be able to get a permit for educational
purposes or for research purposes.
And for some of these species, especially the ones
that we just listed, a lot of them are the ornamental
species, and some we have cultivar exemptions.
And I'll talk about some of those as we go through 'em.
And then, there's also, we developed these best management
practices for organizations like highway departments.
They're going down the highway, and they're mowing.
And they're mowing these things.
And they can't avoid all the time from moving these things
around.
And so, the best management practices tell them you should
be mowing at this particular time in order to minimize the
spread of these things.
And so, if they follow those best management practices,
then they're complying with the law.
We also have a nursery stock phaseout, and this is just
for the species that have just been listed in the last year.
And they're only for the restricted species.
Those are the ones that are already fairly widespread.
And so, for these, for nurseries that already have them
in their ground.
Like if you're Bruce Company and you've lined out a bunch
of these cultivars, Japanese barberry, and you've still
got 'em in stock.
We don't want Bruce Company to have to rip up all their
stock and destroy thousands of dollars worth of stock.
Instead, we're going to allow them to go ahead and sell
those for the next four years from now for woody species
and two years for herbaceous species.
It started a year ago.
But only for what's already in their stock.
You can't bring it in.
If you're at garden center and you're bringing in
your plants, you can't bring 'em in.
You can't propagate anymore.
We just want to get rid of what's actually out there
already.
And so, if that applies to you, if you own a nursery,
then if you have any questions let me know.
So, what we're gonna talk about now is some landscape
plants that become invasive, and I'm gonna run through these
fairly quickly 'cause some of you may have these and some
of you may not.
This is a tree that most of us aren't real familiar with,
Amur Cork tree.
And we found that we have several large populations
in Wisconsin.
Unfortunately, up in Chippewa County, they now have found
that they have many large populations of like five
to 10 acres that we're gonna have to deal with.
And it probably came from a couple of plantings, and the
birds took these berries from the female plants and planted
them around inadvertently.
So, this one actually again it has a male plant and
a female plant, and the male plants are allowed because
they're not spreading the berries.
It's only the females that are not gonna be allowed.
Real easy to identify by this bright yellow inner bark.
Princess tree, this is one that looks very much like Catalpa
if you're familiar with catalpa tree at all.
The catalpa has those long skinny pods that look
like cigars.
The princess tree has fuzzier leaves, and the pods,
the fruit pods, are smaller and more rounded.
But they produce lots and lots of seeds.
And the flowers also look like catalpa, but the leaves
are heart-shaped.
And they range from being six inches across to being
two and a half feet across.
It's a very fast growing tree and one that is prohibited,
so we really want to get rid of all of these that are
out there as far as, you know.
And we're working on it with the ones we've found so far.
Callery pear is an interesting one.
Super common landscape tree used all the time, especially as
a street tree.
And when they initially release these, there were many
different cultivars, and they were all sterile.
So, we didn't have to worry about these things spreading
'cause most people don't want fruits like this falling on
their sidewalk or falling in their lawn.
So, they're sterile supposedly.
Well, what's happened is we're now seeing that they're all
producing these fruits.
And in the states just to our south, Callery pear is
showing up everywhere.
It's really common in woods, in open areas, on roadsides,
really common.
And what they found is that they're actually crossing
between if you plant one cultivar on this block and another
cultivar on this block, and they're within bee pollinating
distance, they're crossing.
And so, now, we found that my very rough observations
this fall, about half of the trees I saw had fruits
in the Madison area this fall, which means we're gonna
start having them naturalizing, and we're gonna start having
problems with them soon too.
We haven't seen that when we first put, you know, when
we did this rule a couple of years ago, we didn't have
any evidence of any of any wild Callery pears in Wisconsin.
And now, we've been finding 'em a few places.
Amur maple is another one that's spreading just in
certain areas, and we think that it's the actual straight
species that's the problem.
And so, all the cultivars are exempt.
Burning bush, one that a lot of people have burning bush.
But we also are finding that in some areas, it gets
really invasive.
So, a lot of forest that look like this where just
the whole understory is burning bush.
And it's pretty distinctive because it has those very pink
leaves in the fall.
And so, we don't know exactly which species are problematic.
We know that again the straight species, and there's one
cultivar called Nordine that one of our nursery people
were working with has seen it in his nursery just explode
and spread all over the place.
And so, those are the ones that are restricted for now.
It might be later that we find other cultivars that are
a problem, and they may have to get restricted as well.
Japanese barberry, we're basing what we've done on some
research that was done out in Connecticut where they
grew out about 70 different cultivars of Japanese barberry
and found which ones had the most fruits and which ones
were most viable.
And so, of those, we had the 25 most weedy that we've
restricted.
Oriental bittersweet is one that we're finding is very
widespread in a number of areas, and where it spreads,
it causes huge problems.
And if you've ever taken a walk in the UW Arboretum here
in Madison in the Grady Tract, which is south of
the belt line.
Up until a few years ago, it looked like this.
It's just this vine growing all over everything.
And it will climb up into the tops of trees.
It will actually girdle the trees by wrapping around it
and basically choking off the trees.
Very problematic.
It's fairly easy to tell from the native bittersweet
by the fruit.
So, this is the native bittersweet here.
It has the large clusters of deeper, redder fruits
at the ends of the stems.
Whereas the non-native has smaller clusters at each of
the leaf nodes.
The non-native also has much more rounded leaves.
Whereas the native is narrower leaves that are more
tapered.
Porcelain berry, related to grapes,
it's grown as an ornamental.
This one is prohibited now.
So, all populations need to be controlled.
Again, it spreads just like grapes by birds,
and it can grow just like grapes, which can get into trees
and really kind of wreak some havoc.
The difference is that grapes have a lot of native predators
that feed on them and keep them in check.
Wisteria's an interesting one because it's not supposed
to be hearty here.
The Japanese and Chinese wisteria's both are only supposed
to be a zone south of us.
Yet, we have a population up in Central Wisconsin with
several acres of this that had gotten planted, just
one plant, and it spread in that area.
And so, these now are prohibited as well.
However, there's a very nice Kentucky wisteria that's native
to North America, and that one has lots of cultivars.
And so, you still have a wisteria that's available to you.
Okay.
Who can name this plant on the left?
Dame's Rocket is what I heard. Correct.
And what's the plant on the right?
- [audience member] Phlox. - Phlox, yes, garden flax.
So, the difference here is that Dame's Rocket has four
petals.
Phlox has five petals.
Dame's Rocket is in the mustard family.
All the mustards have four petals.
So, Dame's Rocket is the troublesome one here.
And it's invasive, and the phlox is not.
And so, here's a situation where you could have an invasive
plant that you might be growing.
You could easily replace it with one that's non-invasive.
Moneywort is another one that we've just added on this year.
This is a very small vine that grows very prostate
on the ground.
But it gets into flood plane forests and can completely
carpet the ground underneath the flood pane forest.
So, this is one that we've only regulated the green leaf
varieties.
We haven't regulated the yellow leaf varieties.
Goutweed.
A lot of you probably groan when you see this plant
'cause it's really a pain to get rid of if you happen to
move into a house that has this.
And then, it moves into forests as well.
And so, this is one that we really, there's no reason
why anyone should be planting Goutweed.
This is just a problem plant.
And it really can be very difficult to get rid of.
Garden heliotrope.
This is one that we're just seeing in a few areas,
especially in Northern Wisconsin, where it gets into
wetlands and really takes off quickly.
Just one to watch out for.
This is a Balfour's touch-me-not.
It's a jewelweed.
We actually had two jewelweeds that we added to the list
this time around.
There's another one that's much taller and has very
deep crimson kind of flowers on it that we've only found
a couple populations in Wisconsin.
This one I started seeing in landscapes around Madison.
And it spreads very quickly.
It's a jewelweed.
It's an annual, so it spreads really quickly.
But it's also really easy to control by just hand pulling
because it's just an annual.
So, as long as you pull it before the seeds develop,
then you can keep it under control very easily.
Yellow iris.
This one is not native.
A lot of people think it is.
It can get into shore lines and really kind of wreak havoc
on shore lines especially and in some wetlands.
Then, we have a couple of aquatic plants that we didn't
think were gonna be able to survive this far north.
Both water hyacinth and water lettuce, both are really
beautiful, floating water plants that people put into their
water gardens.
And most people deal with them appropriately.
At the end of the season, they let 'em freeze out, or they
dispose of 'em in their compost pile or something.
But then, there are a few people that think, oh, I can't
let this go.
So, I'm gonna dump it into the river.
And so, we've now had multiple occurrences of both water
lettuce and water hyacinth that have over wintered
in the Mississippi River and a number of other water bodies
as well for several years.
And if you've ever grown this in your water garden,
you know it reproduces very, very quickly.
And we had acres and acres of these that we had to pull out
this year.
And so, we now have evidence that it is over wintering.
And as much as we don't like having to regulate something
that is a really nice ornamental that most people use
responsibly, we can't keep everybody, we can't make sure
everybody uses it responsibly.
There's some things we can do to prevent some of the spread.
First step is prevention.
Don't let these things get in.
Next is early detection.
Find 'em early, and then control them.
And then, restoring the native community.
I'm not gonna get into restoring today.
But prevention, the first thing is don't use species
that are known to be invasive.
If somebody tells you that something you have is invasive,
then look it up.
Find out if it really is.
Stop the site disturbances, or maybe you're allowing some of
these things coming in.
And minimize the spread of seed.
Often times, people bring these things in unknowingly by
moving in plants from some place else, by moving in soil
or compost, or even just off their boots.
And if your neighbors happen to have some of these things,
then share some information with them about it.
We have lots of these little wild cards that are at
the booth at the IPAW, Invasive Plants Association
of Wisconsin, has here.
And you can share those with your neighbors.
And don't let things go to seed.
If you can avoid it, really minimize allowing things
to go to seed.
And then, cleaning off your own gear from one place
to another.
So, early detection requires that you actually learn how
to identify these things, of course, and really get to know
the ones that are possibilities for moving into your area.
And then, monitor the site on a regular basis.
If you happen to have a forested area, and you don't
have garlic mustard in it yet, you are really lucky,
and you will eventually get garlic mustard.
So, you should be monitoring that site on a regular basis.
And as soon as that garlic mustard starts showing up,
you start pulling it, and you pull it every year.
And you may want to mark the area.
Maybe you want to map it.
But you want to go back every single year and remove it
because one time alone is not gonna control something.
I'm gonna try to explain this graph a little bit.
Basically, this shows how it's important to catch things
early.
So, this is when you can detect something in here.
Acres infested over time and control costs.
So, if you catch something when it just first comes in.
First plant, you don't allow it to go to seed, super easy.
You just pull it up, get rid of it, and no problem.
If you wait just a little bit longer, it's now gone to seed.
You can still get it controlled if it hasn't really
taken off.
And still without a lot of effort.
If you wait until it's really a big population, you go, oh,
this is a problem, something I probably should have
noticed earlier.
Then, it's gonna be a whole lot more effort for you.
And so, it's really a lot more work.
It's a lot more time to do any of this
if you wait.
A couple of the early detection species that I want
to let you know about.
One of them we just found out about last spring that we
have a couple populations of in Wisconsin is this buttercup.
It's called lesser celandine.
Blooms super early in the spring in April.
And then, dies back by the end of May.
And but, it's still taking up space in the forest.
And so, the couple sites that we found have completely
spread along a flood plain in a couple of the rivers
in Southeast Wisconsin.
In Cleveland where they've had this problem, it's actually
spread up into the forest floors.
And almost every park they have in Cleveland is just the
forest floors are dominated by this plant.
So, we really want to get this one out as soon as we can
before it starts, before it gets like Cleveland here.
Japanese hops is another one we're really concerned about,
it's spreading in the streams in the Southwest part of
the state.
And it very quickly can dominate the stream.
It's an annual.
And it can get into an area like this and just completely
dominate an area.
And it actually kills everything else that's on
the shore line.
And then, it dies back in the fall when it gets cold.
And then, the whole shore line is exposed for erosion.
So, big problem.
So, this is one of those that we really want to get people
to control, report and control, as soon as possible.
Another one, an example of one is fairly widespread.
but at your local area, you might be able to catch it
while it's still early is teasel.
There's two different species of teasel.
They both behave about the same.
Super easy to identify any time of year because it has these
very distinctive seed pods.
You've probably all seen 'em growing up if you've driven
in the Fox Valley area or even around the belt line
around Madison you've seen these.
Really easy to control by mowing, or by pulling,
or by digging if you catch it early.
But if you let it go to seed, look at all those seeds
that develop in just one plant.
And you've got a problem if you let this go to seed.
Okay.
I'm gonna quickly run through some of these control
methods.
There's a wide variety of different control methods.
And what you're going to use really depends on your site,
and on the species, and on what you have the capability
of doing.
And there's lots of resources out there on our website
and other places that you can have used to figure out
what control method's gonna work best for you.
There's manual control methods, mechanical methods,
chemical methods, and then biological methods, which we're
not gonna go into in any detail here.
We're just using insects to control a species or a disease
that's specific to that species.
So, for manual control methods, one of the most common
things is to hand pull things.
So, this is what you do if you have garlic mustard
in your yard is you're gonna hand pull it.
Good idea to always wear gloves.
There's some species that you really need to wear gloves
to deal with them.
But even for something like garlic mustard, which you
can eat, you should be doing it anyway just in case
because you're gonna grab other things as well.
Be sure to get the entire root.
If you don't, it'll just re-sprout, and you're gonna have
more sprouts coming up.
And you want to make sure you're careful about what you do
with those tops as far as disposal.
If you have a large area, like you're working on a park,
and you have a patch as big as this room and you're gonna
have a couple people come and hand pull,
you're just going to burn them out and there's no way
you're gonna get it controlled with hand pulling.
Don't even try.
And really, if you're gonna be doing it, you need to use
an herbicide instead.
And so, if you just have small areas, then certainly hand
pulling is something that's reasonable.
So, if you need to dispose of some of these things,
there's a couple of things you can do.
Here's an example with garlic mustard, if you break off
this top, there's little bugs right up here that will start
to send new sprouts.
So, it's important to dispose of really carefully.
And here's some things that you can do.
We've just recently found out that composting at municipal
facilities or good industrial facilities where they actually
have large compost piles, and they get the heat up to
a proper temperature, and they have a mix of carbon
and nitrogen ratios, and they're really doing it correctly,
you can kill most seeds with that.
And we have a colleague who recently did his master's
research on that and found that both garlic mustard
and buckthorn seeds, which are big heavy, hard seeds
are killed within only a few days in a properly managed
compost pile.
Your backyard compost pile that's a little pile in a little
bin is not gonna get hot enough to do that.
And so, if you're gonna be putting seeds into your
compost pile, you are probably gonna get things germinating
out of your compost.
So, be really cognizant of where you're putting these
things.
If you can, drying these things out and burning them
is a great way to dispose of these things, especially brush.
But most of us don't have that opportunity.
And you can if it's one of these plants that are legally
regulated now as a restricted or prohibited species,
it can be sent to the land fill, although brush is
really not appropriate to send to the landfill unless
it's chipped.
There's a lot of leverage tools you can use to pull.
And this one is called a weed wrench.
There's a number of others as well.
And they work really well.
You just you clamp 'em on to the base of the stem
and yank it out, and a lot of these plants are fairly
shallow rooted, so they're fairly easy to use.
But you have to be careful because they really do create
this very disturbed site.
You can also dig these things out or cut them out for
this is a parsnip predator.
It's actually a tool that's ground down in order for
you to, so you're shoveling out only this little area
where the actual root is rather than the entire area.
And so, you can get the root out easily with that.
This is parsnip, well, parsnip plants that are being
pulled here.
And sometimes you can actually hand pull things
like parsnip as well.
But, of course, parsnip is something you have to wearing
gloves and long sleeves and long pants if you're gonna
be working with that.
Mowing can be really effective if you have a large area,
and it's something that you want to just keep it from
going to seed.
You're not gonna kill anything with mowing, but you can
keep it from going to seed and keep it from spreading.
So, it can be very effective if you do it at the right time.
If you do it too late in the season, you're just gonna be
spreading stuff.
Fire is a very good tool in depending on what your
situation is if you have an oak woodland, if you have
a savanna restoration, if you have a prairie, fire is a very
good tool for doing control work.
It's not something you should be doing if you're not trained
on how to do it, and you should never be doing it alone.
You should always have enough people there with you.
I learned very early in life, my dad liked to go out and
burn the fields next to our house, and we had to call the
fire department more than once because it got out of hand
when it was just he and I out there taking care of this,
and he didn't know what he was doing.
And neither did I.
So, you really need to do it right, and you need to do it
at the right time of year.
And you have to make sure that you have decent fuel
in there otherwise you're not gonna get a hot enough
fire in order to actually kill some of those seedlings
and things that are coming up.
If you're in a city, one of the things you can actually do
is use a propane torch, and this can be done like on
a fairly damp day, like even if it's just kinda like misty
and rain, then it's really safe because you're not gonna
get a fire started.
And it works really well on seedlings.
And so, in this case, you're looking at garlic mustard
seedlings.
And when they first germinate, then you just have this
bed of seedlings.
And you hit those with a torch, and you've killed them off
because they don't have a good root system developed
yet, and so it's really easy to kill 'em that way.
If these were more mature plants, you wouldn't be able
to kill 'em with just a torch because they'd have a good
root system.
Herbicides are something that you need to use really
cautiously and safely.
If you're not familiar with using herbicides, then get a lot
of advice before you start using it.
Make sure you follow the label directions.
Every herbicide is designed specifically for certain
types of plants and certain types of uses at certain
amounts.
And so, if it says use one ounce per gallon, don't use two
ounces per gallon and think it's gonna work better.
What it probably will do is burn down those plants
instead of being absorbed down into the root system
and kill the whole plant, you've just killed off the top.
And that's not gonna get you there.
It's just gonna re-sprout from the root system.
So, use it as the label actually tells you to use it.
Make sure you're using the proper herbicide for the site.
I was talking with somebody here yesterday who said that
he was using Tordon™ for some of his brush control,
and one of his hickory trees right next to the brush
got sick and died.
Yes, Tordon™ you don't, first of all, you're not supposed
to use Tordon™ if you're not a certified applicator.
And we know that it translocates through root grass from
the plant that you're spraying to the tree next door.
And so, people kill their trees by doing that.
And this guy probably did that.
And so, really be careful of what you're doing.
Be careful of any drift that you're doing.
Never do it on a windy day.
And wear the right equipment.
At minimum, you're gonna wanna wear good gloves
that are rubber gloves, and so you're not getting it
on your skin.
Rubber boots are a good idea, and then some kind of clothing
that you can wash separately from all the other family
clothing.
And be really careful about tracking that pesticide
as well.
So, some real basics about herbicides.
You can either have a pre-emergent herbicide or a
post-emergent herbicide.
So, something like round up that a lot of you are familiar
with is a post emergent herbicide.
It kills plants that are already up.
A pre-emergent herbicide is something that you put on
the ground to kill things when they first come up.
If you're an organic gardener, you can use corn gluten,
which you can get at feed stores and use that as a
pre-emergent.
And it actually kills those seedlings after they germinate.
So, there's a number of different things you can do.
Some herbicides work in both ways.
They also, you either have a selective herbicide, like
something that maybe only kills grasses, or something that's
non-selective, like again like Round-Up that kills
everything that it touches.
And then, you can have ones that are just contact only.
They only kill the top tissue, or it can be systemic.
So, it actually gets into the root system.
But most of the time, you're gonna want a systemic
herbicide, something that actually kills the roots.
The technique that's used by most people for a lot of
the woody species is the cut stump treatment where you
actually cut the plant down, and then you apply the
herbicide to the stump.
You really only need to apply it to that inner bark
area in order to prevent re-sprouting.
And I'm not gonna go into a lot of the details on this,
but it's something that's fairly easy.
It's very targeted.
You're not getting herbicide all over everything else.
There's a lot of other ways you can apply herbicide to
a stem.
There's basal bark application.
Here it's used fairly commonly.
And then, some of these other techniques are used as well.
A foliar herbicide application is what a lot of people think
about when they about herbicide.
And that's when you're actually spraying it on the leaves
or on the plants.
And so, again, you need to be really careful.
Make sure you're doing it just correctly, following the
label instructions, doing it at the right time.
If you do it at the wrong time of the year, you've wasted
your time, and you've just put a lot of pesticide out on
the landscape.
And almost always, it's gonna take more than once
to do it.
So, as a landowner, some of the things that you
want to be doing about invasive species is learn to identify
these things.
Get it identified.
And before they're a problem, don't watch something
that you say oh that thing looks kind of odd.
It's kind of weedy.
It's been spreading a little bit, but I'm gonna wait
a couple years and see if it really takes off.
You are just asking for trouble if you do that.
Get it figured out as soon as you start noticing it.
Monitor your property, and watch for things.
Prioritize your control efforts.
Some things maybe aren't worth working on.
And then, follow recommended control methods
and prevent the spread.
And I'm gonna show you a couple of resources
that are available.
Throughout the state, we have cooperative invasive
species management areas.
These are groups of people that help people
with work on invasive species work.
And so, they're all available.
These are on our website not on the Invasive Plants
Association of Wisconsin website.
And these are some of the websites that are available.
The one that I do want to point out is this
Midwest Invasive Plant Network website has a really
great control system on it where you type in
the name of a plant, and it will tell you all the
different control methods that work really well
for that plant.
And it will show you ones that are chemical
and ones that are non-chemical, and how good
it works the first year, and how good it works
a year later.
So, it's a really useful site.
Okay.
I really want to quickly run through earthworms
because some of you are familiar with earthworm
issues, and most of you probably think earthworms
are great things.
And yes they are good in a garden for the most part.
And they do certainly aerate garden soils.
But they're also problematic in our forest
especially.
None of our earthworms that we have here in Wisconsin
are native to Wisconsin.
We had a mile thick of ice here during the glacial
period, and none of the earthworms survived that.
It's really tough to survive thousands of years
underneath a mile of ice.
And so, as the glaciers receded, then our
forest eventually developed, and that was without
the earthworm because we didn't have people
moving things around in trucks and other things
that were moving earthworms at the time.
So, all of our earthworms that we have here now for
the most part are European.
They were all species that were brought over here
for bait, or they came over in soil when people
brought over plants.
Lots of different ways they got here.
We have three different groupings of earthworms.
And one group is the ones that are way up on
the soil surface.
That's the Epigeic ones.
They're generally fairly small and not a big problem.
Another group is the ones that are down a little
bit lower.
The ones that are more of a problem
are the nightcrawlers because they reach up,
they grab the organic matter and pull it down,
and then they essentially eliminate organic matter
from the soil surface.
So, this is what you have happen in a forest.
This is an uninfested forest where you have this
nice cushiony layer of organic matter that breaks down
over several years.
In a heavily worm infested area, they pull that down
into the soil, and you end up having this very hard surface.
If you walked in a wood lot that has a really hard
surface on it, you have a lot of worms there.
This is what happens to trees.
This is the original soil line of this tree.
And this is where it is now because of the earthworms.
And you could see it in a forest where you can see how
this hard packed soil here because the earthworms
are in this area here.
the earthworms have already been in this area,
and this is all Pennsylvania sedge.
It's one of the few species that does really well
after earthworms have come through.
And that and a number of other weedy
non-native species do really well in these
environments.
And so, the earthworms actually create a habitat
for these weedy species.
And garlic mustard, we know almost always comes in
after earthworms.
So, I do want to mention this.
this new worm that we found in the state just a few
years ago, we found it first here in Madison
at the Arboretum, and it's probably in other places
as well.
We knew it was gonna come eventually.
We knew it was out in New England, and that it comes in
soil and sometimes comes in plants.
But it's really hard to prevent moving it.
And it's very easy to identify as opposed to some
of these European earthworms.
It's much more firm when you hold on to it.
It feels like the body of a snake in that
it's firm, and it thrashes about.
It wiggles about for the first minute or so that
you're holding to the point where it jumps off your hand.
They don't actually leap.
They don't like leave the ground, but they do
jump around.
They can actually lose their tails when they're thrashing
around.
And this clitellum, which is a band that's on
all earthworms that are mature.
You won't see it on an immature worm 'cause
this is the reproductive structure.
It's completely solid all the way around on these worms.
The European earthworms are hermaphroditic.
it takes two worms to reproduce.
Any two worms have both male and female parts to them.
These jumping worms only are pathogenic.
They only take one worm.
They don't have to reproduce.
They don't have to mate at all.
And so, as soon as they become mature, they start
sloughing off these cocoons, which essentially
is what over winters.
So, the adults die off, but the cocoons over winter.
And it's a problem because they reproduce very quickly.
We have at least two generations a year.
When we first started finding them in Maple Bluff,
which is a suburb of Madison, we found a landscaper
was putting down three to four inches of wood chip mulch
of like very fine wood chip mulch on these landscape beds,
three to four times a year, and it was disappearing.
And the plants she was putting in the beds were dying
because the mulch was being eaten down.
So, they eat not only the mulch, they eat the organic
matter.
They eat the roots of the plants, and they eat the soil
itself so that you end up with these coffee ground kind
of worm poop essentially.
That is what the entire soil is in those areas.
And we have a terrarium over at the UW extension booth
if you're interested in going to look at that.
And so, they cause a lots of changes.
The cocoons over winter, and very easy to identify
the soil if you think that you might have them.
You're not gonna see the worms themselves until
like July because they're very small.
They hatch out in like May.
And then, they're growing.
And so, you may see them in June, but they're
not fully mature.
And so, you won't be able to identify 'em until
they're mature in around July.
And then, by September, you have a second generation,
and that's the time when you can really see them.
If you have these worms, you'll find them by September.
We know that they get spread around in mulch and wood chips
and grass clippings in plants.
They probably got to the arboretum because that was where
they always put their plants when they brought them in
from other places.
And that's the area where they were originally
were found.
This is what they'll do to a root ball of a plant
where they actually feed on all those roots.
And you can see that kind of granular structure of
that soil.
That's basically all been processed through earthworm
bodies.
And so, when a garden club or somebody else digs up
plants from their yard, and then sells them, every one
of those plants if that yard was infested they're selling,
they're transporting those earthworms too.
So, to keep from getting them, if you don't already
have them, try to minimize what you're bringing into
your yard.
Bring in clean soil that's like top soil that's actually
come from places that's actually that it's sterilized.
Or, bring in plants that look at the plants carefully.
See if they have that soil signature of that granular soil.
And don't bring them in if you think they might have the
earthworms in them.
Otherwise, you will infest your whole yard.
If you already have them in your yard, don't give people
plants from your yard.
Don't take your plants from your yard here to your
cabin up north 'cause you will infest the north woods.
And at this point, we don't of any infestations in
the north yet.
And so, we really want to keep it that way.
So, we know that they're spread in wood chips.
in leaf mulch, they like to climb up into the leaf piles,
and then the leaves are collected, and then shredded,
and then they are used as mulch.
And we know that they're spread as bait.
And they don't really make great bait because they break.
Remember they're really brittle.
They wiggle for a little while, but they don't keep
wiggling all the time.
But they're sold as Alabama jumpers online.
And you're not allowed to buy 'em in Wisconsin.
This is a restricted species in Wisconsin but it is
something that is still being sold.
So, lots of folks are impacted.
If you live in the Madison area, you may already
have these in your yard.
And it's actually, they're being found throughout the
southeast part of Wisconsin.
So, this map is old.
Unfortunately, now we have pretty much a line
like this.
So, pretty much the southeast corner of the state
all had reports of the jumping worms.
There's a number of things you can do to prevent the spread
of these.
Mostly just being careful not to bring stuff into your
property that might have it.
And if you think you have them, don't let things
leave your property, including like your shoes.
You might want to clean off the mud off your shoes
before you go somewhere if you know you've been
in a place that is infested.
There's not a lot we know about right now but what we
can do to kill them.
We know that there is a chemical that's being used
on golf courses that causes earthworms to come up,
and then they desiccate in the sun.
And we're trying that out to see if that works or not.
And it's still in the experimental phases.
We have several different grad students that are working
on earthworms right now.
We're really doing most of the research here in Wisconsin.
There hasn't been a lot of research done elsewhere
in the northeast about these.
So, if you have any questions after we close out here,
then you can come visit our booth, and you can, of course,
look at things on our website and those other websites
that were out there.
And I'll close out now, and then we'll take some questions.
So, thank you.
(applause)