Community and scientists unite against invasive species in Adirondack Park

At annual meeting, Adirondack Park Invasive Plants Program reports on successful partnerships

By Tim Rowland

The Adirondack Park Invasive Plants Program held its annual Spring Partners meeting at the Whallonsburg Grange on April 25, updating its perpetual battle by land and by sea against an ever-increasing number of environmental threats to native plants and ponds.

The meeting was followed by a tour of the Essex Quarry, where the Adirondack Garden Club (AGC), Champlain Area Trails (CATS) and town volunteers are establishing a beachhead against invasive trees and shrubs that have been running unchecked since the land was largely pastured as late as the 1950s.

APIPP Director Tammara Van Ryn said the wide net cast by a partnership of nonprofits, governments, volunteers and a private business made hundreds of thousands of visitor contacts and boat inspections in 2023, and caught 2,200 aquatic invasive species that were clinging to hulls and potentially could have infected other water bodies.

“Imagine if even a fraction of these had entered a new water body,” she said.

Testing water bodies for threats

The fight against aquatic invasives is also growing more sophisticated, said Aquatic Invasive Species Coordinator Brian Greene, and includes water samples to detect the presence of invasives. 

These tests, which detect cellular residue of plant, insect and animal life, have shown the relatively good health of Adirondack waters. “Our tests come back and we don’t find a lot of stuff,” Greene said. “That’s actually a good thing to have.”

The tests are considered to be accurate, but “nuanced,” Greene said. For example, one sample showed the presence of quagga mussel cells in Sacandaga Lake, where they are not known to exist. But dead mussel cells could have ended up in the lake without there being a live population, Greene said — excreted by a bird, perhaps — and further testing will be needed to decide the question one way or the other.

The important role of citizen scientists

For the most part though, more low-tech detection methods of surveys and citizen-sightings are still the primary method of tracking invasive species. 

Ari Giller-Leinwohl, terrestrial invasive species manager, said, for example, there were 106 detections of the hemlock-killing wooly adelgid in Warren and Washington counties at 940 survey points. 

Eradicating the adelgid is no longer a possibility, so the focus is on mitigating damage. So too is  climate change a wildcard. “As winters warm and cold doesn’t kill off (insects), is that going to facilitate the spread?” Giller-Leinwohl said.

While the adelgid “is beyond containment and eradication,” said Zack Simek, APIPP’s Conservation and GIS Analyst, plans are in the works for rapid detection of the insect’s spread and treatment programs, which are effective but costly.

Around Lake George, hemlock forests are being inventoried through scientific modeling, noting which stands that would cause greater harm —say, through erosion of soils on steep lakeside slopes — if the trees were lost. 

Since early detection is crucial to rapid management responses, scientists are experimenting with airborne environmental DNA (eDNA) to catch an invasion in its early stages, so far with mixed results, said Simek.

APIPP is also setting up test stands, which are long-term monitoring projects on infected sites which, after an infestation, may contain trees that show resistance to the adelgid or emerald ash borer.

Harvesting by hand

At the 35-acre Essex Quarry, meanwhile, Nancy Budd, chair of the AGC’s Conservation Committee, said the infestation of buckthorn and invasive honeysuckle has been “severe.” The quarry, managed by CATS, features hiking trails and tiered limestone terraces that once were an industrial hub but now are being attractively reclaimed by nature.

With a three-year grant from the Garden Club of America’s Partners for Plants program, the AGC is pulling up seedlings, sawing bigger trees and covering the stumps with “buckthorn baggies” to prevent sprouting and propagation, and planting native species to take the place of the invasives.

Under terms of the grant, no chemicals are used, no debris is removed from the property and no species are brought in from off-site. 

On the 1-acre work site,  Budd said it’s hoped that buckthorn — which made up more than 75 percent of the canopy — honeysuckle and bittersweet will be replaced with goldenrod, baneberry, asters, elderberry, oak and other natives. Seeds from these species were collected by garden club volunteers in the fall, exposed to cold to facilitate germination, and will be replanted later in the year.

Piles of buckthorn trunks and limbs, meanwhile, are stacked in formations attractive to wildlife. “We feel that once the invasives are removed, this will prove to be a great place to go bird watching,” Budd said.

Photo at top: Clearing invasives such as buckthorn and honeysuckle at Essex Quarry revealed a small, scenic pond. Photo by Tim Rowland