Wednesday, November 7, 2007 - 9:30 AM
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Invasive Species Research and Management on Military Lands.

Robert Lacey, Dick Gebhart, and Matt Hohmann. US Army Eng. Res. and Dev. Cntr, Construction Engineering Research Lab, 2902 Newmark Dr., Champaign, IL 61826-9005

The Department of Army manages approximately 14 million acres of land for military land use. As with other Federal land holders, the presence of invasive species on these lands creates a significant land management challenge. Invasive species competitively displace native species and adversely affect ecosystem integrity and function by altering water, energy, nutrient, and disturbance cycles, which in turn, can cause loss of biodiversity, increased soil erosion, and degradation of threatened and endangered (T&E) species habitat. All of these factors affect sustainable land management, which is a critical component of mission-directed training and testing. This presentation provides the requirements for and describes applied research and development effort to address many technology gaps associated with management of invasive species on Army installations. The motivation for this research is that non-native invasive plants negatively impact military operations, reduce military carrying capacity, compromise long-term sustainability of training lands, diminish training realism, and restrict training land availability. Without aggressive action targeted at identifying, mapping, monitoring, and controlling non-native invasive species on Army training lands, the magnitude of these negative impacts will increase significantly with time.