 Oh, this is William Sharkey with UW Green Bay Sheboygan Campus. He is a professor of geography and geosciences. And he also owns and operates land shark landscaping and consulting in Milwaukee, which focuses on low maintenance landscapes that also function as extensions of urban environmental renewal and integration with surrounding natural systems. So without further ado, we will introduce Professor Sharkey. Thanks again for coming. We humans within a Western society, within cities, versus country, and so on, we have these subdivisions of environment. We have our built world, which is this controlled space that we completely remodeled. We've gardened it. We've built it. We function within it. We drive through it without paying too much attention. If nature comes into it, it's a little bit of a problem, usually involving some sort of chemistry and weapon to push that nature back out of the bay. But on the periphery of this environment, we have what's called nature. There's somehow wild space where nature does some stuff. And it's the space that we visit. We go hiking in it on the weekends. We go camping in it when we have some time. Perhaps we even road trip to say something like a national park. But even these natural nature spaces aren't truly wild in many cases. They still haven't, to a large extent, been impacted by humans through resource extraction or through construction, roadways, or buildings, or whatever it is we're doing. And thus, the nature that's there is kind of natural, but altered. And then beyond that, we have this other nature that very few of us ever go to actually see the wilderness, this very, very wild space. And we tend to not go to the wilderness because things literally there can kill us. Things can literally happen to us. It's where the big predators still roam. It's still where there's lots of bugs. Trees fall down. You have to walk around them. There isn't some convenient guy with the chainsaws. They're in the way for you. These are wild. And for the vast majority of us Western American sorts, we want those spaces. We value those spaces. But we don't access those spaces. And so as a result, our perception of the wild spaces around us is either those that are within our yard and our parks and our build space or just at the creek. And all of those spaces have been changed. So when I take my students out on field trips to a field or some such like that, or when I was out at the Ice Age Center recently in my geology class, I literally tell the students, sir, I want you to walk through the yard and I want you to find five native plants in the next few minutes. And so they'll go out there and they'll pull leaves of this and leaf of that, leaf of this, leaf of that, and a bit of this, a bit of that. And they all come together about a half hour later and lay out there, there, there. Ah-ha, I found XYZ. And I'm like, not native, not native, not native, not native, not native. Oh, you found one native one, okay great. And they don't understand that the vast majority of the grasses that you're looking at aren't native here. They've been introduced through the colonial period somehow, somebody. They don't understand that a lot of the flowering plants that are in the periphery of our building environments are escapeeves that now exist so ubiquitously. When I tell students, wild carrots, not native, they're like, but it's been their my whole life. Your life and your parents' whole life and your grandparents' whole life, it's still not native. But it is what we call naturalized. And so what is native, what isn't, often comes down to what we perceive it to be. What is somehow valuable to us in our immediate built landscape. Getting in our cars, sitting around, we just don't have to touch that stuff. So a lot of what I teach in my classes and in my public speaking is just about how, I mean, the big problem we have is there is environmental crisis out there. There's a lot of things that are happening in wild spaces right now that native plants are disappearing. Right now we've done entomological studies, bug surveys basically, and we've recognized that about a third of all insects have disappeared from our native landscape here in Wisconsin. Now for most people they're like, go ahead. Fewer bugs, less of a problem, less to clean up, less things to kill with the vice water and so on. But that has a larger impact on the operation of the natural systems in the wild spaces. Those bugs serve a purpose. They have a niche within this wild landscape. Their food and their predators, their consumers, their controllers, they all have a functional role in the system. But our use of pesticides and agricultural landscapes and in our yards and then the built landscape removing so much of the landscape, they're fading from the landscape. And for most people that's good because they're windshielded. And that's about the end of that, right? Well, no, it's a bigger problem than that. You're supposed to have a dirty windshield because your windshield isn't supposed to be taking out so many to start with. But somehow that doesn't impinge upon our daily what we need to focus on stuff. Coyotes in the city, big problem, big scary thing. They can get your animals, they can even attack people on a occasion. That's a scary thing. Nature isn't supposed to come into our built spaces. When nature comes into our built spaces, it's something we feel like we have to react to, control somehow, call it an R. But the truth of the matter is, is people don't realize how much of the native landscape that those species existed in has now been eliminated and those species need somewhere to function. Mountain cats, for instance, mountain lions in California is a big problem. They're moving into their own landscape with great frequency and they're not afraid to attack people in resource-poor environments. When there isn't much else for them to hunt, they will hunt for it's available. Unfortunately, people need to be afraid to fall prey to that. We have this perception, there's a divide between my built stuff and that wild stuff. The wild stuff is supposed to respect that line and wild stuff doesn't know there's a line here to start. So we have trouble looking at nature. It's more of a problem than a solution in many cases. So what we're talking about in Vega Systems is a little piece from my lectures. There's basically three broad ways we look at ecosystems. When we look at the wild functioning of a thing. And these three top boards there, resistance, resilience, and redundancy kind of encapsulates the whole idea of ecology. When we talk about an intact ecosystem when it's healthy, that's functioning, there's a lot of species that have come together over evolutionary time to work in a cooperative way. Each species eats certain things, it accesses certain resources, other species eat other things and access other resources. And through this cooperative behavior ecosystem operations, the system has filled all of the available niches. So for a non-native species to come into that system is difficult. There's not a lot of food for them to eat because it's already been eaten by dominant species already present. There's not a place for them to establish themselves because the spaces are already filled by the established species of the system. So the system is basically resilient. It's resistant against invasion or even disturbance. When we talk about a primary forest, for example, a climax forest, fire is very, very rare in our northern forests. They're mature, they shade the landscape. They keep a high humidity at ground level. That high humidity keeps a lot of water in the soils and in the underlayer allowing for rapid decomposition. So there's not a chance for fuel to build up. There's not, it's too wet for fires to really get going and so fires happen but rarely. But if we go in and take out half the trees, well now the sun can get to the bottom of the floor and dry it out. Less water means less decomposition. So there's more fuel in them. The drier the condition, the higher the probability of fires. So now that we've altered the system by removing pieces of it, we've reduced its resistance to disturbance. Wind can topple trees more easily if there's just a few than if there's a hundred of them. Fire can burn through a thinner system than a thick, full-fledged climate system. And the same is true in the basis of species of plants or animals. If the system is intact and fully operational, it is very difficult for species of non-native origin by human transport to come in and establish themselves. So that's the first thing we have to look at whenever we look at an actual system. Wilderness is resistant. Nature is not. Built definitely is not. Built can allow anything to come in and establish itself. Because it fits into the books and crates that are available. Next is resilience. Say something bad does happen to a system. As with you, you get sick, you get knocked down, you spike the fever from period of time, you're at death's door. Somehow you recover. Your immune system kicks in, your resources come to rally around you, and you recover and you bounce back. You have a high resilience. You're a strong organism in this regard. So mother nature's kind of the same. So there are some environments such as the east coast of the United States where hurricanes happen all the time. That's a disturbance. Hurricanes blow through, floods, trees get knocked down, tornadoes tear stuff up, mother nature is a train wreck once the hurricane gets done. But in very quick order, that system has dealt with that disturbance so many times, the plants and animals in that system can recover quickly. It's just like it got the flu that it can quickly bounce back and reestablish the system in traditional order. So as long as the natural system of the natural plants that are adapted to that reality are there, the system can recover. But if we remove some of those key species and replace them with less resilient species, well now when a hurricane takes out southern Florida, half the vegetation is eliminated and cannot return, it's not native adapted to that one disturbance. It doesn't come from an environment where it had to adapt to that reality. And as a result, we now have a lot of dead wood on the landscape, a lot of dead material on the landscape that we now have to pick up the bill to remove because it can cause fire, it can cause all sorts of secondary threats because the resilience of that system recovers entirely up to us. We have inherited by our alternation the cost of that healing and reconstruction, which costs our economy millions of dollars every year. It's a huge payout for us recovering from natural disasters, which another nature is prepared to deal with, but our alteration of it is not. Last of this is redundancies. As with everything, if you have an electronic device that has one primary circuit and that circuit is disrupted, the device is dead. So the more redundancies you have within the system, the better able that system is to deal with one part of the system going down, other parts of the system can pick up the slack and carry on the work. So in a healthy system, for example, you don't have one of them or you have 20 of them. We have deer, we have elk, we have bison, we have this, we have that. You don't have one predator, you have a number of them. You don't have one of anything. The system has multiple copies that do similar or near similar work so that if one species is damaged through disturbance or disease or disaster or human intervention, other species can still function in the system and do the necessary work. The more of those species we remove though, the more and more it falls to us to act as the primary redundancy. For instance, here in Wisconsin through the late 1800s and early 1900s, hunting was a primary cultural activity of the vast majority of Wisconsin males who was a European legacy. A lot of our food grain sources came from hunting deer. Therefore, cougars and wolves were a direct competition with those military hunters. It was across the United States. It was the primary addition to remove those wolves with rapidity as much rapidity as we could and we then took over the primary predator position. That worked for a while. The trouble is for the last three generations, there's fewer and fewer young people wishing to engage in the hunting process so that means more and more white-tailed deer survive to perpetuate the next generation which means they are literally over-browsing their landscapes and causing all sorts of ecological collapses and results. So what do we left here? Either A, we get more people engaged in this process of us being the primary predator or B, we reintroduce the predator itself. So we have in many areas reintroduced the wolf. It's a great success ecologically. The trouble is, is the wolf has a storied history in the human psyche and our perceptions aren't. So when you look at most people in an urban landscape, they have wolves as sculptures and photographs and it's somehow spiritual in its symbolism as this free and powerful wild thing. Okay, but then the farmer has to deal with those wolves affecting their calves or fricking their sheets or lambs or some such because they are between these countries. There's free food they're gonna get. So the rural farmers of the rural folks have to deal with that predator-warming wreck. They have a more physical reality of it than an urban folk do. Unfortunately, most of us here in the United States are now urbanized and so the fight is a hard one for us to discuss. Removing the spiritualism, moving the predatorism and trying to talk about the wolf as a functional aspect of an ecosystem is a factual conversation that a lot of people can sit and listen to without engaging one side or the other of this kind of emotional argument. So how do we reintroduce redundancies and still leave out the human-built stuff is a very hard problem for us to try to solve. So we talked about those climate systems. That's what we encountered as our ancestral columnist came here and started disrupting things. Did anybody write any records down? They were so busy with acts and saw and everything else that unfortunately the naturalist scientist didn't breeze ahead of Columbus and document everything and its ranges and species composition and tendencies and so on and so forth. And so today we're saying, okay, we're gonna return this back to natural and native. What's that? It turns out in Wisconsin, at least in the Milwaukee area, we have only one documented sort of kind of plant survey done by a gent and increased lapin in 1830s. The next botanical survey doesn't appear in the record until the 1960s. So what happened to everything in between? What was all the micro- and macro-habitats? What was all that stuff? Well, we don't know to a large extent what the climax botanical population out there truly was prior to disturbance, turning it into agricultural land states and so on and so forth. And so we have to extrapolate through scientific studies of similar habitats elsewhere to try to figure out what that climax is supposed to be. Thanks to FIPS like Aldo Leopold with another Wisconsin Antian History and Time, we now have a firm understanding of environmental science and ecology by which to base those kinds of studies in the going forward, is still a struggle for the common folk because it's not something we automatically teach as part of our primary programming. This is what environmental science is, this is what you need to do, this is how you need to understand it, to naturalize it. We don't get that as a primary consumer of education in this country in that way. And so again, it's not something in the forefront of the majority of citizens' minds to say this is how we're supposed to do this properly. Instead, it's left to the gut, it's left to an emotional response as to what nature is or should be. So that becomes, thus, the debate in much of this. So once we have a disturbance, human-caused or otherwise, we then have this natural reset to the system which I talked about, eventually returning back to climax and time. So if you go to Northern Wisconsin, we clear cut that lean slate in the late 1800s, early 1900s. There's very few standing trees once our ancestral umber jacks got through there. But if you go up to Northern Wisconsin now, you can't look anywhere without getting a tree. They're all only about a big, but it's tree over again, which tells us that left to its own devices, certain biomes and ecological systems will reset themselves, even outside of direct human intervention. But not all systems can, nor do all systems do it in the same rate of speed. We have an indulgence here in our tempered biome. Of all the biomes out there, the tempered biome recovers on its own the fastest. The tropical, the arctic, the desert, the purple wetlands do not. They take much longer arcs of time for the native species to re-establish themselves and go through the process of succession and return to that original climax forest. We humans don't have the patience for that. We want to do it in one human lifetime. But the truth of the matter is, is it takes two or three human lifetimes for this to really go through the cycle. So it's a multi-generational investment that somehow we have to invest not only in our kids, but in our grandkids. In order to keep that process going, that's a hard thing to do, especially from a government perspective. Governments every four years can change and be fickle. And so it's hard to keep a consistent plant operating on that arc of time. Somehow it's supposed to be faster. So when we lose this resistance due to our removal of the key parts, this is when invasive plants have an opportunity to come into the system. But that original intact system, non-native species, animal plants, that otherwise have a hard time coming in and establishing themselves. They can't access resources because they're already being utilized. There's no space for them to come in and fill because it's already filled. But once disturbance has happened, now space is available, now resources are underutilized, and invasions can now finally come in and really establish themselves. And so really since the late 1800s, invasive species have been coming into the United States in ever-increasing volumes because we humans move stuff and we've disturbed a lot of stuff. And a lot of those early invasions, we just didn't really conceptualize what was gonna happen. Why do we have starlings here? Does anybody know where starlings came from or how they got to the United States? You know, Shakespeare in the back, no? What's that? Shakespeare? Shakespeare Society, yes. They were putting on some Shakespearean plays in New York in the late 1800s and to give an authentic feel to the presentation, they brought all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare from Europe and released them in Central Park. And starlings have now taken over the United States of America. They've become very successful in their spread and fashion. There was another group of fundamentalist Christians in the early history of the United States who tried to do the same thing with biblical birds. Unfortunately, desert birds don't do as well, but just the same day also for the same motivations to bring what they knew of home or spiritual tradition and culture tradition and replicate it here because this after all was just an extension of Europe. It didn't occur to them that this was fundamentally a different place. So now those species are here, what do we do? Can we remove them? What's the cost? Who's responsible? Well, cost on that scale requires a large cooperative effort past the fall to the scale of government. The government isn't really doing the investment. So does it fall to the hands of citizens? Well, we have active groups such as this one, but it doesn't involve the entire community. It's only small activists within it and sometimes that's a difficult action to undertake. Even our native species can be a little bit of a problematic occurrence in all of this. We generally think of non-native species as those problematic species. But I can tell you what now, if you get a box elder invasion, it's the end of your existence. That is a native tree that is hyper-adaptive to disturbed landscapes. It thrives in repairing borders. That's where it evolved. Repairing borders flood, things get damaged around, you know, trees, you got rid of them, but box elder doesn't care, but keep growing just forget about it. Unfortunately, you clear away all the unedited forest to serve the soils and buckthorn will take over. The same with red cedar, which is another native tree, but given the opportunity, clear away the competition, boom, all you have is a red cedar forest. So this idea of invasiveness really covers both native and non-native species very often, even though in much of our minds it's only the non-natives we have to worry about. The native species are just as engineered to take over disturbed landscapes as the non-native ones, and meaning cause equally as much problem. If you've ever had a cottonwood invasion, you can sympathize with me. There's nothing worse than 50 cottonwood trees going into the bloom cycle. They're all over the plants. So a couple of key words here we gotta deal with. We talk about all this plant stuff. First at the very top of this is this idea of native. Well, we live here in Wisconsin, and as you well know, about 8,000 years ago, there was a giant ice shield for us that is now gone. And when there was an ice shield here, there were no plants. So therefore, by definition, nothing is native. It was just ice. That ice retreated, and all of a sudden all of this vegetation comes trumbling in and establishing new ecosystems as it expanded into this new range that became available to it. So how do we slice and ice this word native? Well, take the human piece out, basically, and you've got native. Animals and plants that spread through natural dispersion establish an ecosystem of a new habitat, survive and thrive through multiple generations of relation of their own power. In other words, these species are spreading under the laws of natural selection. If you go there and survive the climate and survive the conditions, you can stay. Die in winter, you out. Die at predators, you out. Die from fungal disorders, you out. So the natural conditions act as limits on species as to where they can go, how they survive and thrive. So by definition then, species is indigenous to a given region or ecosystem. If its presence in that region is a result of only natural processes with no human intervention. In other words, it survives and thrives by its own invention. I don't know about you, but I didn't see a possum until I was about 20 years old. There were no possums where I grew up. Well, it turns out possums aren't native to Wisconsin. They're actually native to South America. They came over the land bridge a couple thousand years ago and they were in Texas and the southern states for a long long time. They didn't move into our area of the world until about 150 years ago, depending on where you draw that line. There are new species here, but there are species that came here, found in niche they could survive and thrive in and now occupy that as a naturally expanding species. So they're considered native even though they're a native new arrival. If you ever go up to Hurricane Marsh, there's pelicans up there now, black-tipped pelicans. First day I drove by Hurricane, I saw pelicans in the sky just by wreck my car. I was like, what? The pelicans? What? This isn't Massachusetts, what the heck? But there again, there were pelicans here at one point in time. They have reintroduced themselves, but there we are. It's just these species find opportunity they can spread. They are here by their own natural forces. So a couple of ways to look at that. Now, when we talk about plant species or animal species, we have this whole classification of what they are by animal, plant, family, genus, species, so on and so forth, by which we classify them in their relationships. But when we talk about plants especially, we get lost a little bit here. What is a variety versus a cultivar? So it turns out a lot of plants are close relatives to each other and plants within the natural landscape can have several varieties amongst them just like humans can have several varieties amongst them. They're all still fundamentally the same species but they have distinctive characteristics that make them slightly different from their cousin on the road in some way or other. If you have any hawthorns in your yard, try to identify it, I challenge you. Because here in Wisconsin, we have over 20 varieties of hawthorns. They're generally said, you know all the flowers pretty much the same amongst them but some have thorns, some do not, some have low leaves, some do not. But the children of them are fundamentally different than their parents yet again. So we're basically hybridizing as new relatives and so we get a lot of composition and itch during them. Now we, our ancestors would find certain varieties and breed the plant for that variety and we would get something specifically that we want through selective breeding which is a lot of how our domestication came along. We found a particular plant that had characteristics together which didn't happen, we brought that into domestication. Culturbar of that aggressive intentional human process is the result of that. We've hybridized plants to such a degree that we humans drove that evolution of the plant and we've resulted in something that we can give a distinctive classification as a cultivar too. So cultivars and varieties, varieties are natural variations of the hybrid process. Cultivars is the human product of that which is more aggressive and much more detailed and focused. In an animal we would call that a subspecies but in a plant we call it. So when you go to the store and you're looking for a new plant to put in your yard for landscaping purposes, there could be a lot of varieties of native plants or non-native plants. But what's distinctive amongst them is different varieties have distinctly different characteristics. They may produce different fruit. They may produce different sizes. They may have different colors, different root structures. And some could be problematic and others not. Trouble with that is if you get a variety of a native plant, it's maybe not a variety that's common here. It can hybridize with our native crop and change the native status of our plants because a variety has been introduced that's not particularly dominant or first in this region. So it may be regionally native to the Midwest but not specifically native to Wisconsin and that can be somewhat problematic with some types of species. And cultivars, the same thing. I don't know if you've ever seen an Alberta spruce but what you're really looking at is a white spruce with dorsal. It's a spruce that has a genetic mutation that prevents it growing into full-blown spruce. Every now and again you'll see one spruce arm kind of come shooting out of an Alberta spruce and you want to cut that off so it keeps its eyes warm. But what you're looking at is a genetic mutation that we've turned into a cultivar. In nature it wouldn't exist, it would die out but we found a way to exploit that for our landscaping purposes. So that's just an example of what we're talking about. So when we talk about invasiveness of things, some varieties of some plants are cultivars and some plants are very problematic but other varieties and cultivars are not. In addition to that, some plants are unisexual. In other words, they have both sexes in one plant and some are what's called diesius where the sexes are split. If you have ginkgo trees, you have probably most likely a male variety of a ginkgo. Because if you have a female ginkgo tree, you will regret it to the day you're dead because the fruit of a female ginkgo tree hits the ground and smells like rotten meat. So we use ginkgo as a really tough tree. It's a beautiful landscaping tree but we have to wait till that tree grows up enough to prove itself a boy or a girl. The girls go away, the boys we keep and plant on the roads because they're a neater urban tree for what we want to use them for. So that's another aspect of cultivars sometimes we have to consider is how do they manifest the sexes and therefore maybe one section of the other is advantage for what we want it to be. Native range then just talks about where the native recurrence of this species are. There's a couple of websites for you to look at real quick that kind of lets you look that up so you have a better idea of what kind of plant you maybe want to look at from a data sense. Because here in Wisconsin we have a lot of trees that are native to the United States that are not native to Wisconsin. And if you know black locust bunches. Black locust has a wicked thorns on it. It's this beautiful breathtaking white blooms in the springtime that are fragrant with a perfume. But it's a cloner. It'll establish an entire colony of itself and take over entire landscapes in just a handful of times. It's native to Kentucky. It doesn't occur here. It was brought here because oh, this is a cool Kentucky tree, we'll bring it up here. And now it's taking over Wisconsin in other areas of the Midwest. In Kentucky it has natural predators within that region that it has evolved with. Here it does not. There's no limit to its growth here in Wisconsin beyond human intervention. Cutting it down doesn't kill it because the root mass can go for hundreds of square yards. So you kill one, well 50 more is gonna pop up. So once a plant like that gets in, how do you control it? But, officially it's native. So by law, by intention, by desire, we're focusing on the non-native plants. We're not looking at a native cultivar or native species. That is also problematic. It isn't supposed to be here. We have to talk those all through Wisconsin, which isn't invasive, but it's a commonly planted landscaping tree. It's not native here either. It's exclusive to the Mississippi River Boat World. It doesn't occur this far either. Or, for that matter, honey locusts also don't naturally occur here. Again, it's restricted to the River Boat World. But, it's an advantageous tree. It has a botanical qualities we like and so we spread a far and right from its native landscape to expand its range to a broader native landscape. So is that a problem or not? It can be. So native range is something we have to calculate it all in that. So non-native has all these other words to it that's kind of hard and fuzzy and hard to divide. We have non-native. We have exotic. We have invasive. We have invader. It turns out when we talk about these plants, especially under policy and law, those words have powerful meanings. Invasive is any plant that invades an ecosystem by human introduction. That can be native or non-native. So oftentimes when we think of invasive, we think only as a non-native invasive. Well, it can also be boxelberry. It can also be red cedar. It can also be other native species that now are acting as an invader in this particular scenario. Disturbance or whatever is not pretty. So non-native is specifically defined as plants that we humans have introduced. Somehow, some way. Accidentally or intentionally. It's native someplace else. It has qualities there that made it able to survive here just fine. The trouble is the vast majority of those non-natives come from highly disturbed landscapes such as our native boxelberry. Areas with strong winters or repairing quarters with a lot of flood damage and so on and so forth. So we take it from its native habitat where it's a survivor by the tooth and nails in its existence and we throw it in our garden and it takes over the landscape because here it has less to deal with and can be more aggressively colonizing because it's able to dominate the competition so easily. But then we have non-natives invasives and non-natives naturalized. So we have a lot of non-native plants that are then introduced that have somehow found a niche within the landscape that they inserted themselves into without causing too much undue disturbance to the overall system. Quedansilase, for example, I already mentioned them now. Oxidase is another one. The original chasatimum. These plants are evenous. We see them everywhere around here. It doesn't occur to us that they or a lot of the other wildflowers you see are truth not native. They've been present in the landscape for so long they're clearly not pushing other species out and so for much of the passerby of the observer it's already native. It's already here. And when it comes to law remuneration or effort those are the ones we tend to ignore and go well it's here it's naturalized and isn't messing anything else we're going to need to be. So it's important to kind of get how we classify things. So here at Wisconsin we now have a law. Talk about a tooth and nail fight. It took about 15 years to get this law formulated and finally on the books. But we do formally have a law that regulates what plants are here and what plants are supposed to be here, what plants are gonna leave alone and what plants are we have to somehow control. So we're gonna go to that in just a second because you can go to the DNR website and read about the law. But the law also has its verbiage for what a plant is or it isn't being heard and so on and so forth. They don't use the word non-native, native, naturalized and so forth in the law because those words have so many multi meanings in culture that it's hard to build a law using that. So we have different ways of classifying plants and this is what the law uses. Prohibited, restricted, cautioned, not restricted pending. Now based on the science that we know of that plant and what it does in other environments where we've seen it be the law requires that we know the thing is bad. It's bad somewhere else, it's not here so therefore we're gonna prohibit its introduction here because we know for a fact it's been bad somewhere else. So it's working off of known quantities. Thus plants that haven't yet proved themselves to be problematic anywhere are allowed. It isn't until you are a problem that you get put on the list. Yes, we're gonna go to the website. So just to break down this real quick. Prohibited invasive species that are not currently found here with the exception of small pioneer stands perhaps somewhere where it has gotten in we might be fighting it, recognizing it in some way or other and that or it may be in a larger grade they kind of base an area of maybe an adjacent state even if it's not necessarily Wisconsin but it's been introduced by human activity that are likely to survive and spread as they get here potentially causing a significant environment or harm. Rescriptive invasive plants that are here, we know, we recognize they're here in the state have caused or have the potential to cause significant viral harm or economic harm or harm to human health includes established non-efficient and crayfishes, fish and poultry trade, fish and prairie trade, non-viable fish species. So these are things that are here that you've already recognized or a problem. You may not dig it up and move it. You have to work in all power to remove it from your property should you find it there. Caution, species that cannot be placed in one of the other leaves. In other words, it's an unknown quantity. Knowing what we know about its cousins or its near relatives, we caution whether we should allow that plant to come. Even though it hasn't proved itself to be a bad player yet we're gonna put a label on it and say maybe not but it's still sellable. We can still put it within a store. Non-restricted species that has some beneficial uses as well as negative impacts in the environment are already integrated into Wisconsin Ecosystems, AKA naturalized. They're already here, they've already integrated. We're not gonna bother messing with those. We're gonna recognize through there but we're not gonna try to lay off any action of the law on this. Having species that we're not assessing for classification at this time the plants maybe look at in the future as science allows. So if you go to the DNR website you can see this law here. So I shared the PowerPoints that I've shown you tonight so you can access to all the websites I'm gonna show you here. But here's a quick summary of the law, the verbiage of the law and so on and so forth for you to look over if you're so interested. Here is the species list of that law. So there's a whole list of species. Less of the regulated species because that has animals on it so we're just talking about plants, so we're just gonna look at the plants here. So this is a list of all of the current plants that are being governed by the law. So in the prohibited category of course we have Japanese knotweed, chaff flower. We have porcelain berry, which is like a viney plant. This is the genus species name of it so you can Google these at any time, copy, paste, copy, paste, see all the pictures of the cows at home. Some of these are familiar to us, some of them are not. Bitter cress, napweed, spotted napweed, diffuse napweed, rushing napweed. We have some thistles, scotch broom. Home Depot got busted big time with the law last year because in 20 Home Depot stores in Wisconsin they had broom plants everywhere on the shelves and someone went, oh no, that's native to Scotland and it's very invasive here and Home Depot were like, oh I'm sorry. And they were given a pass this time. They eliminated the plants from the shelves, they didn't allow any sales. Someone identified them on the shelf before sales began and so they were able to kind of backpedal. The trouble is Wisconsin has a law against that species but Minnesota does not. So Home Depot being a multi-state entity buys things in bulk across the whole organization. They have these regional laws, they also have to manage them, some things slip through the rear here and there. Do we have a state agency out there looking at the shelves of all the landscaping companies out there? We've sprinted, no we do not. The only enforcement we really effectively have for this law is you. You knowing the species, knowing what's to be watched, taking pictures, reading names, reading cultivars, going to the list and seeing if it's on it. I have several friends of mine who will walk you that print this list off and they let you go down the aisles and look and see everything if it's on the list or not just to do their homework and act as the watchdog. Unfortunately the way our state is working, we pass the law. If the law is reported, the state comes down and elect that and we don't have police officers looking at all the plant labels just to make sure everything's in compliance. That is where citizen action comes into the primary. Giant knotweed, if you're familiar with Japanese knotweed, it is the bane of your existence. I promise you, you will fight hard and hard and we will not die by glycophage. You literally have to dig it out of the ground, every square inch of that wonder and we'll come back to hunt you. Water hyacinth, we all know the water hyacinth story in Florida. A lady went to a conference in South America and was given a water hyacinth as a croissant while she was there. She came home, thought it was beautiful. She floated in her back pond and it took over the state of Florida in five years. Oh, gosh. So you can't go anywhere in the canals and back ways of Florida and we're all the way onto the Louisiana because that plant has effectively taken over all the water hyacinth. Good thing, cows are needed. So they sculpted it out and feed it to the cattle but just the same, one sweet intention resulted in manifestations on that scale. So of course, here it's definitely illegal but it doesn't survive on wages very well, fortunately. Polygonum, another form of knotweed. So here we have a whole list. Notice here, right above here, we have pennywort which is another floating plant. It's kind of this little plant. We can see that a lot of it in water gardens. Swap morning glories. It's not a large argument that we want to ban some morning glorie seed sales here in the state of Wisconsin. But how do you stop that? Because if you've ever had morning glories in your yard, you'll never be free them again because they are politically reduced. Asian marquite, a marquite is coming in. It's a type of thistle which is common in wetland environments. It was introduced again as a kind of a rain-gartening kind of a plant at one point in time. Japanese honeysuckle box sort of course are both illegal for moving transporters sale here in the state. But they're ubiquitous in the landscape. They are just everywhere, yeah? Who would have been against this law? Why did it take 15 years? The landscaping industry didn't want to do it. Landscaping. The landscaping industry was the primary advocate against it. When you talk about these plants, a lot of these plants are popular as landscaping products. There's literally millions of dollars on those of us that they cannot sell now. And so much like every other market, we're looking for the new fancy thing, what's the new shiny plant? You go to your landscaping shop there every spring and here's a new something around there. I'm a landscaper. I'm like, ooh, pretty. I do the same thing everyone else does. And my first question is, now I gotta go home and research it. So I go across the day and I go home and see where it's from, what does it do, whether it's not. So, fortunately, a lot of the plants that we see are annuals in that here in this environment because of our winter, they can't survive. If we were a little further south, they'd be different stories. So habitat has a lot to do with what? Okay, somewhere else may be a problem, but here we can get away with it for a summer to the guys. Whatever it is, whatever it is. So if you have an interest in these, so that is the prohibited list up there. Then next here we have the restricted. These are here. Is it on the list? Oh, you betcha. On the top list? Yeah, it's on the top. It's absolutely on the list. But Freigmeides is already present here so it's on the restricted list. The trouble with something like Freigmeides is this. We have a native Freigmeides, which is nearly identical to the invasive one. So, which is which? In short, the only way to tell if it's native or non-native Freigmeides is to snip a sample and send it to the UW extension for genetic or cellular analysis. So there was thought, for instance, the shawaitan bog, or excuse me, the cedar bog that Freigmeides was invading the bog. They sent samples. No, that's native Freigmeides. Leave it be. So to the casual observer, it's really hard to tell the difference, but somehow the Freigmeides Australis is the non-native form. It has somewhat of a better edge in getting into habitats, in setting up its clonal habitats and just taking over large clonal masses and forming those very, very quickly. It does that far more aggressively than our native form is. Our native form doesn't form these clonal masses the same way and take all the things the same way. Even though, by the casual observer, they're the same thing. We also have a non-native tree if you're familiar with high bush cranberry. That is the lovely native bush. It's these beautiful red fruits on them in the fall that the red cedar wax wings and the cardinals love all winter months. But the vast majority of the time which you're looking at is actually the European variety. Because our native variety doesn't do all that well in sculpted landscapes. It likes to be out there in the wild. The European variety has no problem being trimmed within an inch of its life along someone's house. So as a result, but if you look at the native form and our wild form, unless you've got a magnifier, you can't tell the difference from the casual observer. So some non-native species are just very close cousins to our natives and are problematic for that, but still to the casual observer are difficult to see. So looking on this, let's go get my days done. You see it killing whatever you have. And that's one of the few things where really we have few options beyond a chemical response. It's just so difficult to get out because literally just that much of a root mass will regenerate the whole plant. So short of taking up the entire landscape and hauling it to a landfill or sifting it all out, it's a very difficult thing to extract in the physical. So it's all chemical? Chemical mowing, mowing works, but most fragmented is frozen up in water in your shore area, so mowing is not. So a chemical response is sometimes our best option. Same with Japanese now, to this day. Especially considering the scale of it, we just don't have the hands of many shovels to go out there and just attack. And digging up an entire coastline isn't necessarily a bit like a logical response to that, because that much disturbance just allows more invasive from other varieties to come into that disturbed environment and it has a negative impact in erosion and all other factors too. So is it a problem or a problem? Will you strain your water? Yes. There's specific varieties of herbicides that break down very quickly in awkward environments, so they can be drawn by the plants, have the effect of the plants and then break down biologically quickly. They're not a very effective herbicide because of that, but they do work for things like probably destroyed fragmites and a couple of their product species that are above water surface. Underwater, that's not objective of that. Rodeo is probably the most famous of well-known variety of aquatic herbicides in the States. But there's very specific quantities and implications as to what you do very, very much. So here we've got a lot of the restricted ones here. So we have wild chervil, kill mustard, marsh thistle, poison hemlock. Yes, the very thing that killed Socrates is a non-native plant here, so don't chew on it. I was in the field, the student Fawke had a wild carrot in his mouth. I just about knocked him out as I tried to get him to plant out in his mouth without scraping it on his teeth. Yeah, he won't see the world. I digressed Japanese hops. A lot of people had planted Japanese hops thinking it was beer hops. It's not beer hops at all. It looks a lot like beer hops in terms of vine and leaf, but not fruit. And so they thought they were planting something for the microbrew and instead got them in a desert plant. So that has been spread around quite a bit. Kudzu has now crossed the Illinois border. It's within 30 miles of the Wisconsin border in the southwest corner of the state. So if you don't know what Kudzu is, it is the vine that took over the south. You literally will grow a foot a day by its own volition. It was introduced by the Soil Conservation Service in the 1930s in response to the dust bowls. We introduced 37 varieties of Kudzu. We found one before we found one that we live here. And then it pretty much took over the average amount. So it's very good soil stabilizer. The trouble is it literally overtops everything else. It just climbs over everything and buries everything in its vine structure. It's edible. Go eat it if you can eat enough. But if it gets into the southwestern Wisconsin, the ruthless area is effectively going to be covered over by a vine. Can you see the vibe, winter? Yes, yes, it is alpine tolerant to a very large degree. Seaside goldenrod. Again, goldenrod, everywhere here. One more goldenrod amongst goldenrods. Who's giving a notice that one? But this one will take over beach areas very aggressively but people don't differentiate them. It's different from a variety. We also have what's called a blue star aster which is a beautiful blue aster you see through the urban landscape. It is not needed. It's introduced and is now everywhere but it's an aster amongst gasters. So from a native view, it doesn't occur to us that's not supposed to be here. So what you can see on this restricted list, there's actually some, not as many of them for him to do but there's still a number of species here. So I would encourage you to read through this list and just familiarize yourself with some more species. Now, of these species, they're not, especially the restricted ones, you've seen them, you know them. If you know you're like mulberries, red mulberries are not native here. Fruit's delicious though. Or not red, excuse me, what? Red's native, the point is not. So the white mulberry is delicious. It blooms at the same time as their native red but it's a weed tree. It pops up everywhere in the urban landscape. The landscape, the birds love it. Why is it here? Well, they try to introduce the silk industry to the United States and it turns out the silk worm eats mulberry leaves. And so they introduce the silk worm and the mulberry and now we have gypsy moths and white mulberry trees. So that's where gypsy moths came from because they produce a silk cocoon much like silk caterpillars will live here but gypsy moths won't. Silk industry didn't work. Caterpillars got out and here we are to grow stuff in that plant forever. So that's just examples of how these things get in here in this regard. So that is all the law covers. So on here you have approximately 150 plants. In the landscaping store on average in Wisconsin there are over 400 different non-native plants introduced within the landscaping market every year. So most of those plants are cautioned. We don't know what they're doing. They're not currently causing a problem so their sale is a lot. So again, it comes down to it, are you making a native choice, a native cultivator choice or a non-native choice? You have to, unfortunately again, natives somehow have within our cultural impressions to not be that showy, to not be that dramatic. Which is why the cultivator industry of natives has really gotten going. Trying to get natives to be something a little bit more dramatic. So that even if it's not a pure native but a native cultivator, it's still something better to plant in our yard scapes than these entirely exotic non-natives which we don't know how to do. Now if they're contained in your landscape, that's one name, but of course they escape to the natural periphery of all the plants. It's how they're all grown. Are the landscaping companies, don't they have any ethics? Yeah, it's called proper. That's the essence of it. That's the core of the rate there. It's what is, we are here to make money, we employ people, we have an economy to drive. We're talking a multi-billion dollar industry. And to sell them, they can't do this, means we put a lot of farmers, a lot of cultivar growers and producers, a lot of botanical scientists out of business. And I mean, your apples are all cultivars. Your pears are all cultivars. Bananas are all cultivars. They're all non-natives here in this region. Apples are not native to those in America. They were introduced by our colleagues, Johnny Atkinson. So citrus trees are not native to the Americans. They were introduced by our ancestors. Yet, they're something that we value as a domesticated cultivar product. Well, it is just the next step to make something premium, something enduring, something something of that value. Fighting that is the problem. So what is the native potential of a plant? That's something we have to assess through a scientific lens, but also as a consumer. So when we're looking at a plant, these are the things to consider as to whether or not that plant is invasive or has the potential to be. First off, most plants, like I said at the store, their current set of adaptations or environmental tolerances will not allow them to survive. So if you have antennas or candle lilies or any number of other things, beautiful in the yard for the moment, but come winter, they're gone. But as climate change manifests, our winters get milder, and more and more of these species are able to winter over. So if you've ever heard of Jenny Wirt or Penny Wirt, it's kind of a bioligene green plant that makes for a great ground cover, kind of spills out pots in a very dramatic fashion. Go along the river corridors of Wisconsin or in Milwaukee, and it is entirely that one plant in the understory of the trees. How it got there, why it's there, who knows? But it's ubiquitous. I have a small hatchet in my yard that I've been trying to kill for five years now. I pluck it out, I pull it out, and every year there's a little line coming out of somewhere. I'm like, are you kidding me? It is the cracking of all things to try to get rid of. So they have a very long persistence. They establish a root mass that has a lot of energy storage. It's a really hard time. If you ever try to get pre-contrarily out of your grass, same thing, right? You can mow, snip, yell, poison, whatever you wanna do, and somehow that thing keeps popping up somewhere in your lawn. So if these kinds of things, what kind of root mass does it have, how much energy can it store? It's a big thing, a perennial, one that can persist from the same source every year. From seed, though, how long can a seed endure in the soil? For the vast majority of non-native plants, it's somewhere between five to 20 years. In other words, you drop a seed, it'll lay there until the conditions are perfect, and then boom, it's over. So garlic mustard has a 10-year seed bank, an endurance cycle. So we can go out and pull garlic mustard for 10 years and still get garlic mustard. So it's one of those things that's really, really, really difficult to extract. And how does it even distribute those seeds? So when you talk about garlic mustard, I challenge you to find a garlic mustard seed. I hate the tenuous things in the world, but one garlic mustard plant can produce 10,000. So one plant, one seed cycle, and now you have a seed bank that's enduring for the next 10. So, and they're so small that just stepping in the mud and stepping away, you're carrying with you 500, 600 seeds as you walk across to the next space. It's a big problem we're having with the wild parsnip. So trails, human access corridors, even animal deer trails and so on, those are the evasive condiments. Those areas are disturbed. The soil is constantly churned by the traffic of humans and animals. This gives these non-native species an opportunity to you establish themselves along the trail, establish reproducing populations, and then spread out into the wild landscape from there. So we have that kind of seed consider about there. Resource competition, a lot of these non-native plants are really good competitors. So garlic mustard's another one of those evil plants. It literally changes the soil chemistry, prevent introducing a toxin that all the other plants around it cannot tolerate. Black walnut does the same thing. I challenge you to grow tomatoes under a walnut tree. They won't have it. Because jump zone is introduced in the soil to eliminate tree competition of native arrivals. And as a result of that, black walnut can dominate a forest landscape for a period of time. Garlic mustard does the same thing. And once you remove the plant, that allopathic change of the soil can persist for years, making it very difficult to then go in and now introduce native plants that can't tolerate that chemical change. And as a result, we have a hard time establishing a native population now that we believe in problematic plants. So allopathic is something we have to consider. Buckthorn, I don't know about you, go hiking in the spring, the snow's barely off the ground. First leaf on the plant is buckthorn. Followed quickly by honeysuckle. Those two plants come from northern Europe in these highly variable, very intensive winter landscapes. They have a short growing season. The sooner you're getting your leaf out, the last you drop it, the more time you have to gather that close to this energy that you need before you go into dormancy. So our native trees, they don't start up. My native trees on my street, I time it every year. The first ash leaf that I see is somewhere late April. Buckthorn, Norway maples, they've had their leaves up there for a month already. So they are already shading out the landscapes by the time our native species wake up and start doing what they do. As a result, they can suppress the germination because our native plants also have a later germination cycle. By the time they get ready to emerge from seed, the ground's already shaded. And so through this dense shading they produce, they effectively eliminate native competition. So our natives just don't have a way to circumvent that. Next to that is who's fighting for the resources. You have the first one out to leaf, you have the first one to get the water and nutrient. By the time our natives wake up and begin that nutrient extraction, it's simply not there. And so our natives are constantly losing out in battle for resources because they don't wake up soon enough to get into the war at the point they need. Our natives begin to lose their leaves in August and they're pretty much in dormancy. By mid-October, Buckthorn doesn't drop its leaves, honey supper doesn't drop its leaves until almost a second. So it's taking out every last inch of those resources they can get to out-compete everything else. Diseases, our native species, our native animals love our native species. That's what they've evolved to consume. They know them, they recognize them. Deer will not eat Buckthorn. They don't recognize it as a food source. In addition, the leaves have a high tannin content and are not palatable or easy to digest. As a result, none of our native predators, none of our native river moors, want to eat Buckthorn. Our native birds don't like to eat Buckthorn berries until winter either, but that poses a problem. One, the fruits are hyperderidic, which basically the birds eat it and they immediately drop the seeds all over the landscape before they have a chance to even digest the seeds. The seeds pass through the system very, very quickly. But also because they're the last thing the birds want to eat, those birds also, that fruit prevents. And so by the time the birds eat it, they literally get intoxicated with the consumption and that causes a high mortality rates in the center areas. So it's a problem-eating, confounding problem of having these species. Now, Buckthorn is Dionysius. There's male and female plants. So the ones with berries are the females and the ones we have to target when we move first when we try to eliminate the species from the landscape. But of course, those seeds now are distributed everywhere by birds. Now, one thing that can, to a degree, control, for instance, right now, we're trying to eliminate Errol Dashboard from the landscape. Well, our first strategy at this, sort of removing the trees, is to introduce a native wasp of its native habitat, which is personally, it lays an egg on the larvae of the Errol Dashboard, consumes those larvae and destroys them. We tested it for 10 years. We won't touch any of our native bugs for once. We know this absolutely. We've now introduced seven populations of this wasp here in Wisconsin, hoping that it will at least suppress the spread of the AB within our native landscape and hopefully preserve our native ashes. But it's projected at this point in time within the next 15 years, ashes will be eliminated from the west. There's simply, at the rate of EV expansion, there's no way to get ahead of it. So we're seed-banking. We're collecting seeds right now and holding in the long-term storage, waiting for the day when all the wasp trees die, EV dies out, and we can finally reintroduce this species back to their native habitats about a hundred times over 15 years. That is the cycle that we're looking at. How did EAB get here? Does anybody know the story of EAB? Yeah. Yeah, what's that? Palace. Palace. There was an aircraft that came in from China that had pallets as part of the storage luggage. The pallets were thrown to the side of the Detroit airport. There was thin streams of bark on the edge of those pallets. The EV larval form of EAB, of emerald ash borer, was in that little thin stream of bark. It emerged, established a population within the ash trees around Detroit airport, and it spread out exponentially from there. The trouble is, as we humans see a dead tree, the first thing we do is cut the tree and go firewood. The next thing we say, hey, let's take the firewood out to the camp. And so, we know for a fact that the Chicago infestation established because some folks had a summer cottage in Michigan, and the tree died. They brought the wood back to the home to burn the firewood at home, and they learned about EAB a little bit later, and then they started looking at the trees in their yard, and they fessed up, called DNR, and said, did we create a problem? And DNR's like, oh, now we have to point, he knows it. And turns out, they were the epicenter for the Chicago infestation, but here in Wisconsin, we now recognize seven different infestations in EAB, which is so far eliminated about 10,000 trees in Wisconsin. Not to mention, of course, the expansion. So, one single thing can introduce these problems into any other thing. Growing season, so here we have a tough winter, so a lot of the plans we're talking about, nine-name status, simply can't make it through our winter cycle, so we make them basically use them for decorative purpose, yeah? I just wanted to say we're getting to the hour mark. I'll wrap up here in just a second. And then we have to, so it's a question of what kind of plant we bring in in tropicals, by tropicals so the cows come home, their dead come winter. But if you're talking about tempered varieties from habitats similar to our own, there's high probability it can go through a productive cycle, it can produce seed possibly, or escape that use and become naturalized or invasive. So I have a couple of, there's another slide here that talks about dispersal mechanisms, we can skip that, because this is the more interesting slide for you to close with. On here I have a lot of variety of, the biggest question I think a lot of people have when it comes to natives and non-natives is what the heck is it? What does it look like? What is this thing I have to worry about? With 150 species governed by law alone, knowing all of them is difficult for even most practice peoples, let alone the varieties and cultivars that can be present. So these websites here give you a wide variety of different online sources, by which you can simply plug in a common name that you hear, or the Latin Regina species name, and you can see what the plant looks like, what its ranges are, where it's problematic, and so forth. So is a species native or non-native becomes a very powerful question then? So I have one of these websites drawn up here for you. So here is the UWGB Cochrane Center for Biodiversity website. So again, and here you can look for trees and shrubs or plants or ferns or any number of things, you click on one of those, and you can even in some cases just type a description of what you're seeing, even if you don't have a name, and it will search the database for close approximations, give you some pictures, I think it's that one, give you the relevant information. So if you suspect you have an invasive in your yard that you're just not familiar with, you can even do a Google image search. You simply upload it to Google and it will find horse correlations across the website and tell you what probably your species is. However, that's great, but on this list of things you also have probably two other vital resources, in the Midwest invasive plant record and Ipaul, the invasive plant association in Wisconsin. That is comprised of a membership of botanists and viral scientists, ecologists, naturalists and all that sort of stuff. You get on their email server and you go, what the heck is this? And 15 people reply to you within five minutes. So if you take a picture or have anything or you say, hey, I heard about this thing, what is this thing? Someone will send you a picture within a day because there's active interactive websites, academics and so on out here that are familiar with all of this stuff and you can join these organizations. For instance, Ipaul's a $20 a year membership. You're on their newsletter, you're aware of all the modern control methods that are being introduced. They send out journals and relevant things. They have a website with all the active information for control when you're dealing with specific non-native clients that is there for you to access as a member or even as a late person who's not a member. But these two organizations are probably the best established in our region and as a vital resource for you to kind of get that basic identification puzzle piece kind of fit out. And if you're anything like me, I go to the landscape store and I type in all the fancy names and their websites to figure out what the heck this new vario is that's coming through the cultivar is and find out the specifics about it. Because again, specific cultivars are banned by law but other cultivar forms of that same plant are not. So one cultivar form of a non-native plant may be problematic but another cultivar isn't and so it's a lot for sale. So ramness is ramness, buckthorn is buckthorn, some buckthorn are nice, some buckthorn are not. So it's important to know cultivar which isn't always accessible on one of these websites but Mibin or Ipaul will tell you exactly so the late person access. And of course, you have the academic network and DWGV here at your disposal as well. So we have a large taxonomic department on the campus but all of the secondary campuses such as Wigan, we have office and environmental scientists and a geographer. So between the three of us, we'll be going to answer community questions in a minute. So I'll click through those websites if you want to see more about them. So PAB. Yep. It's, if there's a tree in the city that's dead, the city will take it down. There's like 4,500 of them, I think they say. If there's a tree on your property that's dead, the city will make you take it down. But as you drive on the roads, even just along the interstate, you'll see a whole forest of dead trees. What happens in those areas when half of the trees are gone? What takes over? What's the impact of all those dead ash trees? Well, this is a disturbance. So depending on where it is, most probably buckthorn or honeysuckle will take it. That's the most probable outcome at this point. Because those dead trees make good bird roosts and the birds sit there and they drop the seeds and so they're very ubiquitous. So honeysuckle and glossy buckthorn are the wetland species and then highland or bush honeysuckle and Granus cathartica is the highland species. So depending on where it's occurring, that's the most probable outcome. But natural succession is manifesting. So native birches and cotton woods and those sorts of species will come in first and begin to colonize and kind of reestablish and then we'll move into the progressives of the ash that's available. Maples then come in until finally we're in a climax of oak, high maple, or pine as the climax forest if it goes on long enough. So theoretically with some management, we can allow the natural succession cycle. It takes about somewhere between 5,200 years for it to get back to an undisturbed. So you can go out there and plant the pine trees and just start from the beginning. The trouble is with that very often because we have an oversized deer population. So we plant a lot of trees, but then the deer come out in wintertime to browse them. So Northern Michigan, they actually fence off about five square miles of the forest, drive all of the deer out for the most part and then fence that off for about 15 years to allow the staff to get higher than the tree, than browsing height. And then they remove the fence, allow the herd back in and fence off something else. And not to try to let native singers and hemlocks get above browse height and so we can save those species from over browsing extension. But that's DNR, that's large-scale money, that's management, that's checking the fence and driving all the herds and so forth. So that's a difficult to do. But most probably most of these dead stands around here will probably result in forest fire. That'll be the quickest up here. That's a big problem on the west right now. One of the reasons we have such an active fire cycle on the west right now is milder winters in Rocky Mountains that allow a native beetle called the spruce bark deer to now die out. It normally is killed back in the winter time in control but nothing is controlling that species and it's removing about 80% of mine forest in the Rocky Mountains. Now we have dead pine everywhere and it's just, so that's at least one of the contributing factors of some of these forest. And we're experiencing the same thing in Canada in the rural forest too. So we're looking at about 50% lost in the rural forest in the rural forest. Oh boy. About 50% lost in the rural forest in Central Canada and Russia over the next 15 years. So I'm gonna say you. Cozumel. Yes. I got a question about the sumac. Sumac. Sumac. Are there two different kinds? One is poisonous and one is not? No. Well there's three native sumacs and one sumac name but not a sumac. So a poison sumac is a wetland species that's not truly a sumac but if you touch it it's much like a poison ivy and you get a reaction to it and so on and so forth. Its leaf looks similar to a sumac even though it isn't. Actually. Okay. We have a ruse aeromatica which is like a shrubby kind of gram cover thing. We use a lot of landscaping and periodically we crush it. And then we have the smooth and the hairy sumacs which are the large clonal stands. You can collect those berries and soak them in water and eliminate them. So those are harmless to keep. And they're native. They're native. All right. Those are all native. All native. All native. They're all native but they are clonal species and they can be invasive if they're not controlled. You get a sumac in your yard one stand. Looks pretty. 50 of them is annoying. Yeah. So they can be quite invasive in this area. That's why we plant them on roadside. It's a group. They're fast soiled. They're in the marsh a lot. And that must be the poisonous one. Yeah. If you see it in wetland environment that's the poisonous one. Because the hunters come home with lots of it. Yeah. All over. Yeah. It's not quite as bad as poison ivy. We don't want to spit it. It's like cottage cheese on the face if they get it on the ear or whatever. Yeah. I just have a comment about the love restoration project at North Point. When people are driving along the way front you're going to see the landscape has changed. We have removed a ton of buckthorn and honeysuckle. So that's what's missing. So now that you've heard all of this is both a buckthorn and honeysuckle you know that those two are not any good. Both of those species are shade tolerant and soft informed so they can grow in dense forest, oral, and sun. That choked off a lot of good stuff on the bluff. And what's going to be replacing that will be native plants and shrubs. When? So. We're on a five year plan. Phase one just started last November. So phase one was removal of invasives along that one area there. But we're going to do the entire lake front. All invasives are coming out. Buckthorn, honeysuckle, the Norway pine. I think we got Norway pine there too. Right. Norway pine. Norway screws? I think it's a pine. But we have experts that are working on it and there is a plan. So are we going to plant this spring? Plant this spring. We won't be doing it. I mean. Yeah. I mean. We're going to be with that kinder as far as planting native plants. I'm not really sure when that's going to happen. And they're kind of facing it again. We have the regrowth to worry about. We don't want to invest too much in replanting if there's going to be some regrowth. But there's also the concern of especially being out of left community soil stabilization is really important too. So they're going to be doing some planting kind of in phases. So not to kind of get started in any way, small signs. But not that we're explaining resources where it's going to not be worthwhile. So they've got the Prince of North Point put a lot of effort into or a lot of resources into having this management plan developed. So it's a good solid plan that we're going to kind of work through in phases. I should also mention if you're not on the LNRK mailing list already, please do sign in with your information. If you want to receive more updates about the North Point project and the progress there, we'll give you updates on what some of those plantings and removals and so on happen. We also do have a Freed Mighties in Japanese Knotty Control program that we are working on coming live. So if that's something that interests you, sign in and we'll give you some more information about that. As well as Roots Restoration of Retreat should go again. It is a program specifically dedicated to mitigating the impact of the emerald ash borer. So we've got a lot of different relevant programs going on. So if you're interested in learning more, kind of sign up and get involved. Just as a side note to what she's saying, if you go to the I-PAL website, as a lay person or a member, there is an invasive identification reporting form here. If you see Knotty Leader Freed Mighties somewhere someplace, you can report it. They put it on the map. That can then be used for targeting for removal. Yeah? The chestnut used to be a really common tree. And the native? The native chestnut. Yeah. And wiped out by a fungus, like 100 sun years ago. They now have two hybridized varieties that are resistant. They're trying to reintroduce much like elms that are resistant to Dutch elms. But it takes a while to cultivar them to get that bred into the population and reintroduce them. Well, I was going to ask after 100 years or whatever, it's been a bit long cycle of clearing out the fungus that now they can just the same cultivar and reestablish. There's still enough of them in the environment to petuate it, much like Dutch elms disease. So with Emerald Ashmore, a tree that big, the budget's going for it until. But with Dutch elms, the beetles that transport the spore from tree to tree to tree are native, the spore is not. But they don't attack a tree until it's about 15 years old. So it's reproducing, it's doing what it does. As soon as it gets big enough, now it dies. So as a result, there's always a sapling population out there that allows the disease to perpetuate it. So we can't let it, like Emerald Ashmore, once the ashes are gone, they're gone. There's no surviving an Emerald Ashmore infestation. It's not like a fungal infestation. There is no maturity, seed, and dye. The mud literally attacks us out. So there is no hope for that species to get past this invasion. So it was a 100% renewal that we can help to make a constitution. What was on the pallets that bark? Because the beetle larva is right in the cambium. So you have the bark, you have the soft tissue layer, the vascular tissue, and then you have the heart root of the tree. The larval phase of EAB lives in that soft tissue canopy. But I mean, what was being transported back from? It was to the pallet. Oh, just an empty pallet? Oh. They used it to transport some stuff from China? It was in an aircraft? The company that used those pallets should be responsible. Well, when the plane was offloaded, they simply stacked the pallets on the side of the airfield in the freight yard, as we do everywhere in the world every day. And what they didn't know is that the EAB was in the bark residuals on their pallet. There's no way to monitor that person. Now we have to use, now in Wisconsin, when you use a pallet, the wood has to be either kiln-drymed or it has to be known in the festive areas. It has to sit and dry out for three years before it can be brought into numbered years. But that's only a matter of whether it's on the ground or not. So that's a very new law. But China doesn't have that restriction. When we first figured out the found EAB, we were at a battle then as to where this thing came from, because there was nothing in scientific literature that allowed us to identify it. And so they went out to the global botanist world and went, what the heck is this thing that a scientist in China was like, oh, that's our little buggy thing. I mean, there was a little, we have a berylus bug, native here. Ash trees and birch trees have native berylus bugs that are cousins of EAB. But they're in a war with the native trees. So they're there, but they don't kill it. But this particular bug is, again, over there, not a problem that's not even noted by people. But once it's here, it can circumvent our native defenses against it and just hold on to the tree. So by the time we recognized it, it was already gone. Can we feel like there's going to be a silver lining? There's been a lot of invasive species in Lake Michigan. And some of the fish haven't evolved and they're dying out. Some of the fish have evolved and they're eating these invasive species. So after 50, 60 years, 100 years, can we expect Mother Nature to help these come up with birds or other bugs to eat these bad bugs? Evolution, unfortunately, doesn't happen to people. And even if we had, say, a native fish in Lake Michigan that likes quagga mussels, it's not going to eat millions of them in a day. So we'll come to maybe some ecological balance, but in short, quagga will naturalize. We'll always be present in the system, preyed upon by native species in control. The limiting factors are going to be somehow. That's the best way of saying it. I mean, it basically is a dead lake right now, isn't it? No, no, we're not near to that. But it's across the whole bottom. It is. It is. That's a dead lake to me. Why do you say it's the near shore area not the deep shore area? So those deep shore fishes aren't affected by quagga in the same degree the near shore environments are. And in a weird way, the only reason the lake is still functioning is because we poor nutrient. We feed the nardin things, but we also feed the native ecology, which are being outcompeted by quaggas. So it is our agricultural runoff that, for the moment, is maintaining the bottom. But the priority is to get rid of the zebras, right? The large extensions. Zebras are now more common in inland lakes. Quaggas, we kind of recognize early on, they're going to slow down their inland invasions. So zebras are off main lake. The next big fear is, of course, something like Asian carp. So if Asian carp get in the red lake system that, that will be pretty much the end of it. Why would anybody be against stopping that from happening? I don't understand that. If you are from Asian cultures, Asian carp is a delicacy. So if you're in the United States and you want to make a million, you just need some carp. You might have to take it into the channel. So introducing to your local lake, if you're harvesting, you make tens of thousands of dollars selling it to the local culture. If it escapes your captivity and gets into the whole system, hey! So we find a lot of these exotic Asian species have been introduced in the American waterways for that express purpose, because there's a demand for the meat within certain cuisine cycles, and they want it, and they don't want to wait for it to fly in. And you want fresh. You don't want a dead fish flying into the channel. So local access. So I mean, if you have a cultural preference, the local culture may not have primary consideration in your opinion. So when you were talking about the wasp, that means the egg is on it in our ash water. Is that something that is regulated like when we give the beetles for perforative strike, where you have to give it from the DNR? It's absolutely regulated. It's not something that's just flying around on it. It's the only way right now. Well, with the wasp, well, the beetles we would like to do, the beetles do not survive our winter well for perforative strike. So we have to intentionally introduce them, which means we have to breed them up. We have to introduce them and they survive maybe one season. But that's usually enough to control perforative strike for a season or two. And we can introduce them in a couple of seasons or somewhere else, but there's a huge cost to that. So we don't do it everywhere. But with the wasp, it can survive and hopefully spread through the entire population and actually release them once. Because once the EID dies out, the wasp dies with it. Because it's only for itself. But is it something that, like you would have to do it through their DNR program or would you be able to get it, like you can get other things that are helpful in sex human actions, get by mail? No, you can't. Because there are so many cousins that don't do what they want. You don't want them to do it. And so if you're just buying it from a distributor, which one do you get it? So the DNR very much restricts and we're gonna introduce this species, we know absolutely this subspecies or this particular bug, now it's cousin. Because it's cousin may not be due. Like Asian ladybugs is an example of this. It was introduced, we thought, oh, these are Asian bugs. They're not gonna survive winter. We forgot that they hide in your house. They literally winter over in your sighting and avoid the extremities of winter and then you're crawling out everywhere in the spring. So- Not just me, so yes. Like this deep one, she has to get it back and set up for the day. So those bugs are desperately trying to get out away from winter as much as we are. And as a result, we allow them to perpetuate in the environment. So they should theoretically have died out. They just didn't come to the fact that they would find habitation with us for winter months. So they're still here. So this particular bug was studied for about 15 years until we're absolutely sure of the variety and it's improbability of attacking native species. And now it's being introduced through the NMR. It can't be done by- Yes? I just, before everybody leaves, I just wanted to just throw into the conversation that cultivars and non-native species such as the ginko tree, for instance, even if you're planting the male plant and it's not gonna become invasive, it doesn't improve your biodiversity. So those are things to consider too. Like if you are really interested in native plants and getting rid of invasive non-native species, then you should consider those things as well. Whether it's improving your biodiversity. Native cultivars and non-native cultivars are often cultivar to limit their reproductive success. Because we want to use them as a pretty, but we don't want them to leave. And so, establishing a native cultivars, for example, in a native landscaping, it's not always a good option because they don't reproduce well and they don't establish themselves like a true native one. So making that kind of choice, you want to pick as close to the indigenous native on all-territorial care in order to have the greatest success. Well, and also, if you're planting the plants in order to help bees and butterflies, then you need a true native plant, not a cultivar. So again, our natives will recognize the native, not the native. Honeybees don't care, but butterflies actually do. They're very species-specific. Monarchs, for example. So I got milkweed growing in my raspberry bushes. You get along great. I get butterflies and bears, it's good. But then you have to deal with this. It's a mess to clean it in the fall and so on and so forth. So not a lot of people want to do that. Personally, I think it's okay. And again, I'll leave you for this. The other question's for you. So if anybody's interested, I'm happy to give you my contact information on campus. SharkyW at uwgb.edu. Happy to send out a copy of the presentation I showed tonight. She has a copy of this role to share with you. Which L and LP we'll have. So you can look at that. Again, I have all those links up there. I would encourage you to check out Nipin and iPaw as a late person. Again, you can get in those organizations. They have a lot of information. You can report, recognize stands, and they create maps so that agencies that are then acting to actively remove fraybees and not so on have an accurate map of where these populations are so that we can target eradication easier. Of course, if it's on private property, after engaged in private landowner, more often than not, so I'll tell you how engaged they are in caring. While you're putting, I do have a couple of books you can look through here while I'm here. This is featured on the iPaw website. It's a recognition of the major non-native plants here in the Midwest and control mechanisms as to how to control them and deal with them both natural and chemical. This is an older, old DNR guide. But again, it has the same thing, a key recognition of key plants. I can photocopy and scan this for you and if you want any particular page out of it, you can go to that. And I have this fancy book as well. These are becoming more common called alternatives. We like our fancy shiny new gardens every year. Everyone wants to buy something, but okay, you see that there. There are native alternatives. Maybe you hadn't considered that. You should consider instead of planting the non-native variety. And this book kind of highlights the options by comparison as to that. For instance, Oriental Bitter Suite looks very similar to our native Bitter Suite, but it will take our native Bitter Suite and vary it in the cage fight. So, don't plant Oriental if you can do the native variety. Trust me, plant the native one. Probably do, but this book here, something you can look through to get some of those ideas. And then if you have just the passing curiosity, here's a breakdown of some basic plants and native plants just to get some visuals if you have some on it. So, easily if you look at while you're here, of course they have a couple of looks that way. Thank you.