Stewardship and Monitoring
Careful ongoing stewardship is important to ensure that native plants establish successfully, invasive species populations remain under control, and any new invasions are located and controlled before they can establish.
Stewardship
Once invasive species populations on a site have been reduced to the lowest possible level and native plant populations have been introduced, ongoing stewardship is still important to prevent invasive species from re-establishing, either from the seedbank or from surrounding sources of invasive propagules. Depending on the site, this can be as simple as one or two visits a year to selectively cut and pull any invasive resprouts.
Additional stewardship requirements can include repairing or replacing features like signage or fencing, mowing or trimming native vegetation, watering native plants during dry spells, and checking and removing deer protection as plants mature. Our team can perform all stewardship requirements for a site, or we can provide guidance that empowers you to successfully steward your own property.
Monitoring
Monitoring a site helps determine what stewardship activities, if any, are required. This can include locating any new invasive species populations or other new environmental concerns such as soil erosion or the presence of pests like hemlock woolly adelgid. It can also include observing the survival rate and regeneration rate of planted species over time, and determining whether any species are not performing as expected and why.
Regular monitoring allows any new issues to be addressed promptly before they can become serious. Monitoring can also be a way to identify how successful a restoration project has been in achieving goals like water quality improvement or the creation of nesting habitat by performing data collection and surveys to observe trends over time.
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