A program to treat invasive species has had successes and challenges, Powell River Regional District directors were told recently.
Tyler Lambert, manager of roads at Capilano Highways, provided a brief overview of the coastal invasive species committee at a recent board meeting.
Lambert said in 2014, for the ministry of transportation and infrastructure (MOTI), the entire focus was on Japanese knotweed and giant hogweed. There are very few instances of giant hogweed left on the Upper Sunshine Coast, he said.
“We found one new site this year,” Lambert said. “It was on private land in Gibsons and has been treated. Japanese knotweed is more pervasive, more so on the Lower Sunshine Coast. We are getting a bit of a handle on it up here. We treated in excess of 70 sites for MOTI on the upper and lower coast combined.”
In terms of treatments for the ministry of forests, lands and natural resource operations, Capilano Highways is rapidly running out of sites to treat for them, according to Lambert. He said a lot of that funding has been shifted into gravel pit maintenance, focusing on Crown gravel pits right now, but that could be expanded to private gravel pits.
“They are a very large contributing factor to the spread of Japanese knotweed,” Lambert said. “If you buy topsoil with Japanese knotweed in it, you have Japanese knotweed.”
Within the regional district, Lambert said there was a small treatment for Japanese knotweed on a beach access on Hollingsworth Road, adjacent to Scotch Fir Point Road.
There were also efforts made to remove Scotch broom around Paradise Valley Exhibition Park in 2014. “The reason for that is the park currently has no Scotch broom in it,” he said. “It’s completely surrounded with it but there’s none actually in the park. The thought process is if we can take it down manually and start cutting it back from the road edges, it will decrease the chance of it spreading into the park. That’s the second year we’ve done it and it seems to be working. There’s way less of it around there than there was two years ago.”
In terms of successes, Lambert said there is an increase in public awareness. On the Lower Sunshine Coast, volunteer groups have formed to help manage invasive species, including on private property. He said it appears there is greater acceptance of using herbicides to target noxious weeds.
“We had some issues in Lund that didn’t go so well but they were minor in comparison to the overall scope of the program,” he said.
Setbacks for herbicide application have provided challenges. Lambert said there is not an aquatically approved herbicide for use in BC. That is why, at Willingdon Creek, treatments cannot be made to the waterline. There is a one-metre setback from the high water mark.
“That’s a huge challenge in sites like that because what we did down there basically didn’t do very much,” he said. “We knocked [Japanese knotweed] back to the one-metre mark along the creek channel. We can control the spread so it can’t get past that, but we can’t do anything about if from there down.”
