Volunteer opportunities to help habitats

Published on April 06, 2007

Destroying invasive plants on your own property is one way gardeners can help rescue our native habitats. Another way is to volunteer for public projects aimed at identifying or eradicating invasives in the wild.

The Invasive Plant Atlas of New England (IPANE) is a federally-funded project to determine the extent to which invasive plants have become a real problem in our forests, fields and wetlands. Based at the University of Connecticut, the program offers volunteer training by experts at the New England Wild Flower Society. The day-long training session includes a slide-program on identifying invasive plants followed by directions on filling out survey forms. Finally, volunteers will be assigned a quadrant on the Massachusetts topographical map to survey for invasive plant populations.

"The ones I did were in Hawley and Colrain," said Allison Bell of Northampton, who took the first training several years ago. She explained that once you find an invasive plant, you count the number of plants within a 30 foot radius of the basic plant population. This information is critical to assessing the magnitude of the problem in order to obtain grant money to help eradicate the invasives.

Three plants of special concern in the Connecticut River Valley are water chestnut (Trapa natans), Japanese stilt-grass (Microstegium vimineum) and pale swallowwort (Cynanchum rossicum), according to William Brumback, conservation director for the New England Wildflower Society.

"Swallowwort is the scariest plant I've ever seen," Bell said. "It's the great white shark. Mount Tom is just covered with it." The twining vine is deadly to monarch butterflies that feed on it.

The next IPANE training session is April 29 in Framingham. For more information, call Ted Elliman at (508) 877-7630.

Watch the newspaper for listings of workdays in the area to help remove invasive plants from conservation areas.

Rid your own property of invasives and then go out and help repair the damage. Time is running out.

- CHERYL B. WILSON