unsanctioned removal of invasives on public land

So, I went for a walk in the nice woods and some nice big trees have nice big English ivy vines smothering the trunks. I was wondering if anyone feels the right or duty to deal with invasives running rampant in a natural area., in a casual way, like you just might happen to have clippers on you to cut off those ivy vines. A drop in the bucket effort, maybe, but satisfying.?

Absolutely. My favorite "casual" way to do this is to get the seeds before they're spread, like mile-a-minute weed berries. Or pull the flowers off Clematis terniflora as they're strangling Hollies or whatever, Japanese Honeysuckle off native Azaleas, etc.

I tried to connect with a group that does this sort of thing in a more organized way, but I didn't hear back from them. I should try again, this is a good time of year to go after vines, at least.

Well, I know you know where to find these english ivy.
A county park here tried to do 'Weed Warriors.' They gave a training session to about five of us , a group session one day, and then you could pull at your leisure and earn a 20 dollar park sticker for the year. I did it for the sticker, you betcha. Unfortunately, the interest was very low, and that ranger got moved, so they don't use any volunteer help on that anymore. I think I have read that Patapsco area has a volunteer group of some kind that has done some. I haven't ever been involved with them.

A couple times a year the Chicago Botanic Garden (which shares land with a nature preserve) organizes a band of Master Gardeners who head into the nature preserve to go after the invasives; loosestrife, etc. There may be an organized bunch of MGs who do something like that in your area. When I do my MG volunteer work we frequently have people join us who are not MGs but want to participate in the cleanup. Or, if it's forestry land, perhaps the local forestry group might organize something similar?

I appreciate your information, but I was initially wondering if anybody here took matters into their own hands, individually.

Absolutely! I'll pull up small bindweed, surreptitiously try to clip trumpet and ivy vines (trumpet vines on farm fence lines on back roads are never safe from me), I've even stopped and dug up dandelions :-)

As a steward of public lands in KY, I appreciate the sentiments stated here and the goals of each participant. I'll offer some additional perspective, and please don't take this as being personally critical. I wish all of you could be permanent (and well-compensated) employees tasked with these duties. Goodness knows that there are more needs than resources to apply to them.

Please attempt to contact the land managers wherever you are looking to eliminate invasive pest plant species. Hopefully, most will appreciate your willingness to assist but they should also want to know who you are, what you are doing, whether you know what you are doing, and why. Imagine if others with the same intent as you, but less knowledgable (or perish the thought -- possessed of some evil intent) were out and about doing the same thing. How would the land managers have any way to sort out the positive work from the negative impacts?

Documented here (where I work) are several individuals who have taken it upon themselves to eliminate Ohio Buckeye (Aesculus glabra) and Devil's Walkingstick (Aralia spinosa) from park woodlands. There are many more who surreptitiously steal spring ephemeral wildflowers; I can imagine the attraction to do so and get away with it under the guise of "invasives removal". This type of behavior is incredibly destructive, flies in the face of the effort to stabilize already disturbed urban forest areas, and reverses the progress made in restoring the diverse indigenous plant community.

I wish there weren't such sinister citizens -- but they are out there. Just as you might suspect someone coming into your garden to "clean it up" unbeknownst to you, so must any responsible public land manager be aware of and approve of volunteers assisting in the very real and necessary work of invasive pest plant removal. Contacting and working with the land manager can also promote the goal of applying more resources to this task. The land manager can document the hours devoted by volunteers to justify either a permanent endorsed program, or enhance the operating budget to hire staff to do the same. Minimally, the land manager can help coordinate disparate activities to generate some synergy by cojoined efforts.

Good thread, sallyg; thanks for starting it.

Excellent points Viburnum, I promise to be a good girl in the future ;-)

ViburnumValley- Thank you for giving the land manager's point of view. How easy it is to forget to look at the other point of view. I understand the concerns and I don't feel criticized. Devil's Walkingstick is something I personally really like but I can see where somebody would think they're doing us a favor getting rid of all the stickers. Still, I almost can't believe somebody did that.
(My biggest worry when I was doing it under the Weed Warrior program, was that a park user would accuse me of stealing or destruction.)

Well, it's good to hear that similar concerns are shared.

Programs like the Weed Warriors are outstanding, because they can easily be advertised and you are essentially uniformed stewards with a well-defined mission. Louisville's Olmsted Parks Conservancy has a similar program known as Park Champions (Be a Park Nut! with an acorn logo). They started much the same way, making huge headway against the ubiquitous Amur shrub honeysuckle. People used to that dense invasive shrub for decades were flummoxed as to why people would be "destroying" perfectly healthy green floriferous and fructiferous plants that weren't bothering anyone. Information, education, example.......and slowly park users and the public are gaining an understanding of the process and the goal.

The devil's walkingstick destroyer was doing so to ease their personal ingress/egress for dumping yard waste in the park woodlands, not concern for public health-safety-welfare. With no thorny things in the way, they could haul mown grass, leaves, and hedge clippings much farther into the woods so it might not seem like it was their deposit (as was obvious when it was dumped right at the property line).

The duality of damage was not only destruction of the Aralia, but allowance for more invasives to become established in their stead.

We still don't know what the buckeye bias was about.

Good heavens Viburnum, you must have some really frightening horror stories! I REALLY promise to be a good girl!!!!

What's everyone's opinion/advice on private woodlands owned by friends & Neighbors? My sister has 9 acres of woods and she's got no problem with letting me keep an eye on them, but she has neighbors around with woods as well. (she's an OR nurse with 6 head of horses, 10 sheep....you get the pic, plus my 11 y-o nephew is a demon with digging and loves to help me - in a few years that dear boy is getting a DG membership gift from me!)

Obviously a private property issue and not where sallyg was headed (sorry for the short hijack) - I'm thinking of perhaps knocking on their doors, reintroducing myself (how often do the relatives of country folk visit??) and asking if they would mind if I looked for obvious invasives (purple loosestrife, etc.) Do you think that's OK? I don't want to saunter onto anyone's private property, even for something like this.

And I guess I should reshift my thinking in that the public areas we have been talking about really are the private property of everyone, so checking in with the land manager is really like knocking on a neighbor's front door.

Re the devils W destroyer- aagghhhhh. How frustrating that must have been. How can anyone regard a forest as a dumping ground.
I have a nice neighbor I speak to occasionally but I haven't broached asking her if I could come over and get to the 'root' of the mile a minute vine problem we share. I'm afraid of sounding like accusing her of neglect.

Another story re: forests as dumping grounds and "invasives" - I recall reading an article earlier this year that talked about how the national forests in California have become hotbeds of marijuana growing, gangs and all! What a challenge those land managers are dealing with.

IMHO, whenever someone is given a "license" to destroy anything living, for whatever valid or invalid reason(s), a Pandora's box is being opened. Even the use of the term "invasive" can be inflammatory and conjures up images that are not biologically accurate.

I prefer the phrase, "aggressive colonizers" because that is what these plants do, and are. They don't have volition or intent to "invade" anything; they are simply moving into an available niche that has often been created by human activity.

Aggressive colonizers do play an important role in severely disturbed areas and we need to be cognizant of that even while we carefully remove some of them from our gardens and parks. Most of the time humans are the ones that have disturbed the habitat and are trying to maintain it in a disturbed or unstable condition.

Nature does what nature does, without malice or vindictiveness, unlike humans.

Nobody here was anthropomorphizing nature.

Invasive plants are obviously a symptom of our collective and repeated willingness to import exotic organisms- forbidden fruit deal. For the sake of public health, we have nothing to lose by trying to preserve the ecosystems. Many plants formally labeled as invasive (aggressive colonizers by some) are what would be known as C4 plants. C4 plants utilize carbon dioxide differently and are considerably more efficient at doing so than C3 plants. This certainly gives C4s an edge in our globally changed climate with double the Co2. Now combine this with human disturbance as pointed out by LariAnn in the above post and we can begin to see the root of some concerns.

Maybe a review here is in order:

http://www.biologie.uni-hamburg.de/b-online/e24/24b.htm

All is not what it sometimes seems.

In fact, here is a much better summary of C3 and C4:

http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/C/C4plants.html

Many C4 plants are from the Gramineae (sp?), or grasses, and have evolved this as an adaptation to drought.

Very good links; I was especially intrigued by the statement that C4 plants are at a disadvantage in temperate zones, implying that they would not have an edge over C3 plants there.

In response to the statement, "Nobody here was anthropomorphizing nature," I must point out that words like "invasive", warrior", and "thug" are not neutral words. Human armies "invade", human soldiers are "warriors", and human criminals can be "thugs". If use of these words to describe the activity of certain plants in nature is not anthropomorphic, then words must be losing their value as a means for communication!

Invasive species are taking a toll on the environment. C4 v. C3 plants would be but one more example of exotic invasive species outcompeting natives. Even a few degrees of warmer temperatures can have profound effects on a species ability to survive. Anyone recall recent threads here started by zone pushers? Anyone seeing a correlation with the proliferation of Z6 plants in Z5 that are not only surviving but thriving? The link between climate change (higher Co2 and temperatures) and success of many invasive plants seems obvious to me. Kudzu isn't just in the southeast any longer, it's in Illinois folks. Who woulda thunk!