Image from the USGS fact sheet.
Phragmites australis, or common reed, is a wetland grass native to North America, where it has grown for thousands of years. More recently a nonnative, invasive variety from Eurasia has been spreading fast through wetlands across the continental United States and other parts of North America, harming people and the environment. USGS scientists funded by the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative are leading new efforts to manage it better in the Great Lakes Basin.
The Great Lakes Phragmites Collaborative
With the Great Lakes Commission, the USGS set up and guides the Great Lakes Phragmites Collaborative (GLPC), a regional partnership funded by the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. Following the principles of "collective impact", it aims to improve cooperation among everyone involved and make the management and study of nonnative Phragmites more effective.
Through a website, a webinar series and social media, it makes information easier to find, encourages technology transfer, and helps resource managers build networks.
- In a 2015 survey of its users, 64 percent of those to whom the question applied had changed how they managed nonnative Phragmites because of information from the GLPC, and 99 percent found it valuable.
- In 2015 its website reached about 11,000 users in the United States and Canada.
An adaptive management framework
Management of nonnative Phragmites is often uncoordinated across the region, and managers are unsure how well treatments work. USGS scientists are part of the core team building the Phragmites Adaptive Management Framework (PAMF), a transparent, learning-based system that targets that uncertainty. Participating managers collect data regularly, and each year receive treatment advice for their own sites from state-and-transition models updated with the monitoring data. Over time this should produce best management practices for different landscape conditions.
New ways to control it
Microbial partners. Relationships between plants and microbes (symbioses) can make some plants perform better and help them invade new areas.
Microbes living inside plant tissue, called endophytes, may let invasive plants such as nonnative Phragmites thrive in many conditions and cope with stresses that native plants struggle with. USGS.
An international team of 11 partners led by the USGS is asking whether management of nonnative Phragmites can be improved by using the plant's existing microbial relationships, a question broken into narrower ones for collaborating experts. Early results have identified fungi and bacteria associated with nonnative Phragmites, including some that help it grow in stressful environments. The team is now working out each microbe's role and how its functions could become new treatments. Like the GLPC, the effort follows the principles of collective impact.
Gene silencing. Could managers hold back nonnative Phragmites and restore native plant communities at the same time? Scientists at the USGS and Wayne State University are developing a way to switch off, or "silence", the plant genes that give nonnative Phragmites the traits that make it a successful invader. Silence the genes needed for photosynthesis, for example, and a plant may be unable to use the Sun's energy, and its growth is stunted. Studies that limited photosynthesis in similar plants, such as maize, led to wider testing in nonnative Phragmites. The goal is a species-specific tool that curbs the competitive advantage of nonnative Phragmites, or other invasive plants, without affecting native plants.
Sources
- Kurt P. Kowalski, Collaborations, Research, and Adaptive Management to Address Nonnative Phragmites australis in the Great Lakes Basin, USGS Fact Sheet 2016–3031, June 2016. https://doi.org/10.3133/fs20163031
- A photograph of maize plants, by E. Golenberg of Wayne State University, is not reproduced here.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from pubs.usgs.gov
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