Hartford
But the battle is worth waging, say conservation experts, who are drawing on a combination of new technologies and stricter regulations to add oomph to efforts to protect the area’s natural resources.
Invasive plants often take advantage of a lack of natural predators to explode through an area, choking out waterways, outcompeting native plants, and sometimes unbalancing entire ecosystems — Vermont Invasives, a USDA-funded program, says 42 percent of threatened and endangered plants and animals are directly harmed by invasives.
The Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department ranked the proliferation of invasive species second only to development in threats to Vermont’s biodiversity, which means the only way to do more damage to an ecosystem is by bulldozing it and paving it over.
In the town of Hartford, Jon Bouton, a member of the Hartford Conservation Commission and the former Windsor County forester, credits the commission’s junior members with taking a fresh approach to invasive species management.
“We have two or three new members that have brought great energy,” Bouton said.
There’s little doubt that the town has stepped up its game against invasives, which are ranked on par with terrorism on the list of threats considered in its most recent Hazard Mitigation Plan (the equivalent statewide plan lists invasives just above the threat level posed by extreme temperatures, and a bit below that posed by drought).
Conservation Commission members have turned to an online program called iNaturalist, which allows for the efficient pooling of invasive species data from people on the front lines across the state. Anyone can input a sighting, and everyone can view the resultant map.
“If we promoted that system for people to look for invasives in the town of Hartford, or within the town forest, that just begins to give everybody a record of what’s there, and where it is,” Bouton said.
For many species, such as European black alder, eradication is not a practical option, because they have become too widespread, including taking root on private land, but Bouton said the program can help keep tabs on plants that have only a toehold in the state’s soil. For example, Bouton said, iNaturalist could help with giant hogweed, a toxic plant in the same family as poison parsnip, but with even more harmful effects for the unwary.
“I rarely see it,” Bouton said. “Very rarely see it. But it is really much more toxic than the parsnip. Get some sap on your skin and if you get sunlight on it, it will form burns and sometimes some pretty significant scars.”
In May, Vermont rolled out its own online-based tool — LIEP (for its focus on the Location, Identification, Evaluation and treatment, and Prevention of invasive species) — which provides information and guidance to landowners, boaters, anglers and the general public to help manage and prevent so-called “noxious weeds.” Vermont’s agriculture agency began keeping a list of such plants in 2002, and in 2012 updated rules to quarantine them by prohibiting people from growing, selling, moving or even possessing them within state boundaries, at risk of fines or other penalties. Under the change, nurseries and plant-sellers are required to clear out invasive plants from their inventories. There are currently 40 species on the list, including shrub honeysuckles, autumn olives, Norway maples and burning bush.
“This is not jut a local issue,” Bouton said. “This is very much a regional issue in the Upper Valley, and throughout Vermont and New Hampshire. It’s important.”
Strife at Maxfield
The Hartford Conservation Commission has stepped up efforts to get town employees to incorporate invasive plant concerns into their normal activities.
Scott Hausler, director of Hartford’s Parks and Recreation Department, has been involved in park management since he graduated from college 30 years ago; for most of that time, he said, the issue of invasive plants cropped up only on those rare occasions when the plant in question actively interfered with recreation, as when an outbreak of poison ivy encroached on the paths that snake through six of its 18 parks and facilities.
But two years ago, when the town opened the Maxfield Sports Complex on Route 5, Hausler faced an invasive issue of a different sort.
Rather than simply manage the land for its practical use, the town department is held to a new standard of responsibility in land stewardship, because the property is, like all large developments in Vermont, regulated under Act 250.
In 2016, the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources incorporated strict new standards into its Act 250 permitting requirements.
Under the requirements, landowners are compelled to get their invasives under control, with the agency requiring such measures as the cleaning of seed-bearing soil from construction equipment, to overseeing five years or more of post-development eradication efforts.
Under Maxfield’s Act 250 permit, Hartford is required to protect the property from invasive plants, and earlier this year, members of the Conservation Commission, after noticing large stands of purple flowers springing up on a wetland, reached out to give Hausler a nudge.
“We appreciate the Conservation Commission’s oversight,” said Hausler. “It allowed us to address it as a priority.”
The problem was purple loosestrife, a European transplant. For more than 100 years, the species’ attractive violet blooms drew gardeners to plant it, but now it’s largely recognized as an environmental threat.
The flower grows in dense stands of up to 5 feet tall and, left unchallenged, can completely choke out a marsh’s cattails and grasses, and all the creatures that rely on them. Over time, the plants’ decomposing corpses will collect silt until the wetland has disappeared altogether.
Once the Conservation Commission made Hausler aware of the severity of the threat, he began an effort to combat the loosestrife.
He learned that, because each individual plant can shotgun 2.5 million seeds into its environs every year, eradicating it from Maxfield altogether might be nearly impossible. But in July, a work crew that the town hired through a program with the Vermont Department of Corrections spent four hours a day pulling individual plants out of the ground by their roots, chopping their heads off, and putting them into black garbage bags to be cooked by the sun, and sent to a landfill.
While Hausler said Parks and Recreation will be active in managing purple loosestrife annually in the future, he never would have recognized that particular problem without the Conservation Commission’s involvement.
“We might be park and recreation professionals, but sometimes it’s horticulturists and gardeners and people that are well versed in all forms of plant life that we need. It’s good to have their expertise,” he said.
For years, the town has been fighting a costly battle against milfoil — an invasive aquatic plant that can choke out waterways — in Dewey’s Mill Pond in Quechee. Despite the regular milfoil-pulling efforts of grant-funded crews over the last several years, the plant has barely been kept in check.
Mary Graham, assistant executive director at the Vermont Institute of Natural Science in Quechee, sits on a town-organized committee to save the pond, and she said a grant-funded suction boat — the heavy artillery of milfoil wars — is due to arrive at the site later this month. She encouraged those interested in helping the waterway to search Dewey’s Mill Pond on Facebook to learn more and connect with ongoing efforts.
“The funds that have been awarded can only do so much, meaning that it is a very small portion of what actually needs to happen,” said Graham.
Nationwide, invasives cost an estimated $120 billion a year through agricultural damage, decreased property values and lost tourism revenue, all categories that are of particular concern in Vermont.
But control efforts, never a sure thing on public lands, get even dicier for private landowners, who have different resource limitations and goals in managing their own tracts of land.
One of the big unanswered questions about invasive control involves not some recently transplanted exotic strain but people: What law, regulation or public education campaign will be most effective in persuading people to look at their land with the heightened standards of native ecology in mind?
It’s a question that will be at least partly answered soon, as earlier this month, the University of New Hampshire received a $500,000 federal grant to learn more about how any given landscape is affected by the interplay between bioinvasion levels, private landownership and public policy.
Knowing Your Forest
Hannah Gelroth, director of the VINS Center for Environmental Education, said that before she got actively involved in the battle against invasive plants, Vermont’s forests looked like — well, like forests.
But that all changed in 2009, when she helped to represent VINS on a group that was dedicated to protecting the Ottauquechee River watershed in Killington, Bridgewater, Plymouth, Woodstock and Pomfret. Her participation in the group, called the Ottauquechee Cooperative Invasive Species Management Area, led her to look at the woodlands around her, including VINS’ 47 acres, in a whole different light. “In some ways you wish you didn’t know,” Gelroth said. “It’s like, ‘that’s an invasive, that’s an invasive.’ It does change your perspective when you start to recognize the plants that do and don’t belong.”
One of the first things a visitor to the VINS site on Route 4 sees is a 2.3 acre meadow that flanks the parking area. From spring through fall, the meadow features a rotating cast of attractive wildflowers, but Gelroth began to understand that many of the attractive blooms — including purple loosestrife, garlic mustard and dame’s rocket — were, in fact, invasives, crowding out components of the natural ecosystem.
Beyond the meadow, the woods featured an understory full of red-berried Japanese barberry and bushy buckthorns, and the Ottauquechee riverbank beyond was festooned with stands of stubborn Japanese knotweed.
None of them were native, and all posed threats to the local ecosystem.
The realization that so many invasives had crept in, largely unnoticed, led Gelroth to undertake a major push with workgroup partners, who spent the next few years mustering thousands of dollars and hundreds of volunteer hours to cleanse the land by pulling plants.
They also hired an outside contractor, Corinth-based Redstart Forestry, to cull invasive trees and apply concentrated herbicide to their stumps to prevent resprouting.
They suffered a setback in August 2011, when Tropical Storm Irene dumped untold billions of invasive plants and seeds, along with tons of sediment and debris, all along the riverbank.
The foot-deep mud confounded efforts to get at the roots of the existing knotweed, and soon sprouted 6-foot vines of a healthy population of an entirely new noxious weed with gleaming leaves— black swallow-wort, a member of the milkweed family with small star-shaped flowers that smell like rotten fruit.
Despite the setback, the volunteers continued their work, and Gelroth says visitors can see the difference today.
“We see a true representation of Vermont woodlands. We see the diversity that we were hoping to achieve. When you walk through our trails now, you’re seeing predominately native species,” she said. “It’s remarkably different.”
At VINS, the meadow still flowers, but subtracting the large populations of invaders has left a mix of blooms that’s more diverse, and that supports a healthier, and more vibrant, local ecosystem. Gelroth said ongoing maintenance efforts are much less intensive than the push to regain all that lost ground, and they’re aided by new practices that ensure landscaping and groundskeeping are done in a way that minimizes the odds of bringing new invasives onto the property, and buttresses the native plants against incursions.
While the sheer relentlessness of invasives will likely prevent humans from ever declaring victory in the war on plants, Bouton said the efforts do pay off, even if some of the benefits will take centuries to be fully appreciated.
“If we can slow down the rapid progression, and we can slow down the epidemic, the explosion of the population, it gives our native ecosystems a little bit more time to be adapting.” he said.
“I have faith that our forest will adapt, but it takes time.”
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.