Volunteers root-out invasive plants in Illinois
May 27, 2014
The forest smelled like garlic. It’s wasn’t the scent that comes from fresh, out-of-the-oven garlic bread, or a bag of garlic cloves — it was subtle. It came from thousands of little, flowering plants; edible greens often used for salads, originating from Europe, called garlic mustard.
On May 14, many of these plants had their slender stems ripped out of the ground by a group of conservationists — the Master Naturalists. They call them an “invasive species,” a plant not native to central Illinois that kills off local plant life.
“Ecology co-evolves,” said Marilyn Leger, co-chair of the Invasive Plant Task Force. “So thousands of years ago we had these birds, these insects, these mammals, these reptiles — and these plants. They all developed interdependencies.”
“When you take something out of that equation, when you throw something new into that equation, then you have disturbed the whole balance. That’s what we’re doing with invasive plants,” she added.
Without the controls from their places of origin, invasives like garlic mustard spread like wildfire and shroud out central Illinois natives, Leger said.
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The hill the Master Naturalists were maintaining on May 14 is a prime example of this — when they first arrived to the site a few years ago, Gerry Russell, a Master Naturalist, said the area was full of garlic mustard and bush honeysuckle, another invasive plant. Nothing else really lived there, Russell added.
Now the hill, which is part of a larger site that’s being restored to a natural area park, is moving along, and with any luck, it’ll begin to look more like the Anita Purves Center, said Derek Liebert, superintendent of planning and operations for the Urbana Park District.
“We’re managing our areas as museums, as environmental education grounds, where people can learn about the importance of the grasslands, woodlands, savanna systems that were once dominant in this area and are now much less so,” he said.
Leger said she has been to the Anita Purves Center frequently, and now, after about eight years of restoration work, she rarely sees garlic mustard or bush honeysuckle.
“Last year, I saw spice bush in bloom for the first time ever. It’s one of two hosts in Illinois for the Spice Bush Swallowtail. If you don’t have spice bush or sassafras, you will not have the Spice Bush Swallowtail butterfly,” she said.
Matt Balk from the Urbana Park District leads volunteers and his staff in working to get rid of invasives in natural area parks, and helped the Master Naturalists in their work on the hill.
“The volunteers are a great resource,” he said. “It seems Urbana has a lot of people interested in helping, so that’s really good for us.”
Every Wednesday he takes a group of Master Naturalists to one of the four natural area parks in Urbana — Meadowbrook, Busey Woods, the Perkins Road site and Weaver Park. And then every other Saturday, he takes community volunteers to the same areas.
“We’ll never run out of things to do,” said Pat Nolan, one of the volunteers that helped out at the hill.
Leger said Nolan has a point — unless more steps are taken to keep invasives from spreading, she said it will continue to be a growing problem.
There are a variety of ecological problems associated with invasive species, Leger said, but only about three percent of non-natives turn out to be invasive. Still, this three percent has disastrous effects on local plant life.
Since the leaves of bush honeysuckle decompose at a different rate than local plants, Leger said, they change the soil chemistry — and that affects which microorganisms will grow in the soil, causing a domino effect that hits local plant life harshly.
In addition to this, nestled between the leaves of the bush honeysuckle are berries, which have harmful effects on Illinois’ state bird.
“The male cardinal, subsisting on a diet of bush honeysuckle berries, turns out to not be that vibrant red that the ladies like. And so he doesn’t get as many opportunities to spread his genes,” Leger said. “Then you couple that with the fact that the bush honeysuckle stems are a lot stronger than the natives – they’ll build their nests lower, and that opens them up to predation.”
With those two factors added together, natural areas receive 20 percent fewer fledglings, Leger said.
“If you think of the entire problem you get a little discouraged, that’s why we got to work on the bigger picture rather than working solely, as much as it’s necessary, at the hands-on level,” she said.
Leger said the major problem with invasives is that a lot of them are on the market, being sold at gardening centers across the country. Her organization focuses on remedying that.
“We’re trying to work with members of the green industry so that they will voluntarily discontinue sales, we’re trying to work with the public so that there’s less demand for invasives and more demand for native plants,” she said. “We’re also trying to get legislation that would add these plants to the exotic weed act.”
Austin can be reached at [email protected] and @austinkeating3.