So Many Weeds, So Little Time: How to Strategically Protect Native Plants (November 17, 2022)

Join Art Gover of Fruittown Land Stewardship Services and Stephanie Perles of the National Park Service (NPS) as they discuss a tool used to prioritize areas for invasive plant management with the goal of protecting native species and important habitats.
Managing invasive plant species can seem like an endless, insurmountable drain on park staff time and budgets. Given limited resources and increasing invasives, strategic management is necessary to effectively combat invasive species. After recent findings from the National Park Service Inventory and Monitoring Program revealed increasing trends in invasive plant abundance in over 80% of the eastern national parks studied, NPS staff adopted the prioritization tool developed by Penn State's Wildland Weed Management Program and The Nature Conservancy to address the growing threat to park resources. This webinar will highlight a few case studies where parks created a prioritized plan to protect their most valued places and embarked on a path towards successful management.
While with Penn State, Art Gover collaborated with PA State Parks for 15 years, developing a statewide planning template and process, park-level plans, and field implementation of invasive species management plans. In addition to the information listed above, this presentation will also summarize the planning process and specific park experiences to highlight successes and ongoing challenges to optimize invasive species management with very finite resources.
This webinar presentation is part of a Guest Speaker Series hosted by Amy Jewitt of the Pennsylvania iMapInvasives Program, a program of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy and the Pennsylvania Natural Heritage Program.