Alaska Invasive Species Awareness Week is June 14-20, and in Kodiak, the Soil and Water Conservation District is hard at work controlling the islands’ many invasive plants. But the district’s work has been made harder by this summer’s late start and the illegal dumping of lawn waste.
It’s a cloudy day in early June, and Masumi Palhof has taken her field crew out to Monashka Bay Road to look for orange hawkweed.
Palhof is the programs assistant and field crew leader at the Kodiak Soil and Water Conservation District. There are twelve of these districts across Alaska, each tasked with caring for their area’s natural resources, dealing with invasive species, conducting community outreach, and more.
“Some people call invasive species bio pollution," she said. "So we’re your bio pollution solution.”
Orange hawkweed, the plant they’re here to contain, is infamous in Kodiak and across Southeast Alaska. It can reproduce without pollination, forms thick mats that are difficult to remove, and easily adapts to lots of different habitats. Palhof said that for hawkweed, Kodiak is basically free real estate. And now that it’s here, it’s suppressing native plants with an adaptation called allelopathy.
“They put chemicals out in the soil to prevent germination," she said. "It’s almost like poisoning the ground around them, so that only they can thrive.”
Right now, the team’s main focus is containing it through treatment, which they do by spraying an herbicide on the plant. The method has worked across the archipelago according to the district: they’ve removed hawkweed from over sixty acres on Camp Island, which is on Karluk Lake on the west side of the island. Noam Pechter, a new natural resources technician with the district, clears the brush from around a patch of hawkweed before Palhof sprays.
“If they’re dandelions like this, you just pick the flower head, so that pollinators don’t come and potentially grab it,” he said.
Orange hawkweed is far from the only invasive plant the district has to deal with.
Back at their office, Palhof looks over a massive board categorizing every invasive species they treat for, along with dozens of locations around the island that they have to survey and manage this summer. The species on her board include tansy ragwort, oxeye daisy, bohemian knotweed, creeping thistle, reed canary grass, and more.
There are plenty of other invasive species in Kodiak that aren’t on her list, like non-native dandelions and buttercups. With limited staff and resources, Palhof says they have to prioritize some invasives over others.
“It’s based on a few factors," she said. "How invasive is it, which resources are at stake, how manageable is it, can it be eradicated, and how remote.”
This time of year is normally the peak season for invasive species treatment and surveys. But Palhof says this summer, they’re off to a late start because of the unusually long and cold winter.
“It’s been tough going because we haven’t been able to do that much management yet, because all the plants started so late," she said. "So we’re going to be a bit time crunched this year.”
Their efforts are being made even more difficult by another phenomenon. At a pullout along the road, right outside of town, Palhof finds a mat of lawn waste that was dumped there by a local. It’s covered in orange hawkweed.
"This is a constant, constant problem," she said.
Palhof said that people tend to dump lawn waste off the road because they think it’s better for the environment than bringing it to the landfill. But when that lawn waste has a bunch of invasive species on it, she said dumping it does way more harm than good.
Despite the difficulties, Palhof said seeing the progress they’ve made is rewarding. She pulled up two pictures of Camp Island, taken twenty years apart. The first picture shows a site covered in orange hawkweed. The second shows the same ground covered in native bushes and grass.
"I really love going to sites that when I first started were, I thought were a basket case, I was like ‘there’s so much here, like how can we possibly control this all?’" she said. "And then, 2,3,4, years later, I go back, and it’s like mostly native plants.”
Invasive species may be a human-driven problem, Palhof said, but that means humans can also do a lot to fix it. You can report any invasive plants you find on Kodiak Island to the local Soil and Water Conservation District at 907-486-5574.
