On a warm day in March, you can still see the downtown Richmond skyline through the not-yet green trees. But just a few steps from the road and the urban landscape fades into the forested park.
It’s here a group of high school students are diligently yanking English Ivy.
"It’s like one root," one of them shouts.
The students compare lengths of seemingly endless root systems.
English ivy is one example of an invasive species. An instructor asks why so many of these so-called invasive species are often so pretty.
“Because they were brought here for ornamental purposes,” a student answers.
“Yeah exactly,” says the instructor.
Plants, like people, have migrated around the world— some brought purposefully and others as accidental hitchhikers. Ninety-nine out of 100 of those migrant plants just die off. A handful survive but integrate without harm, like dandelions, for example.
But a tiny percentage don’t just survive. They thrive, to the detriment of other things. And that small percentage can do a lot of harm.
"It always feels like I’m fighting a losing battle, Cat McGuigan says with a laugh. McGuigan is the invasive species management program coordinator for Friends of James River Park.
"But when I see an area like this on Buttermilk Trail, I mean I’m kind of reminded— We are doing a good job."
She manages a team of three that works within the 740-acres of the James River Park system trying to get a hold of the invasive species.
McGuigan describes the area where we're standing. "If you were to look behind you there’s a lot of brown in the understory that’s all that leaf litter. And then we’re starting to transition into this very dark green understory layer. And that’s a very unnaturally green color for this time of year especially. So we’re seeing a lot of English ivy.”
Ivy that’s covering that brown rich soil and getting in the way of leaf litter composting into the soil, vital to the growth of native wildflowers and the regeneration of native trees. And when that ivy gets pulled up, native plants like Christmas fern, hickory, oak, and spicebush are able to flourish.
“We’re starting to see the spicebush blooms start to pop out a little bit. And so those more diverse woody species help in the long run. When they start to get more mature and everything, they provide a more resilient and healthy ecosystems," McGuigan notes.
And those ecosystems aren’t always just natural— they’re also urban.
Forest health and urban health are interconnected because they often butt right up against each other. If one environment is pretty infested with an invasive species that means it can easily hop into the other.
"In some ways, invasive species are harder to treat in urban matrices," says Sal Flower.
Flower is an invasive species specialist with the Virginia Department of Forestry. They point out that invasive trees, like Tree of Heaven or Bradford Pears, grow commonly in urban settings and because they have no natural checks on their growth they grow too fast, creating weak trunks and branches.
“And so, when a storm comes along they very easily break and fall into roads and power lines and houses and create a lot of hazards for urban infrastructure.”
Another challenge to managing invasive species in urban environments is that it can take a LOT of coordination.
"Cities, of course, are primarily broken up into lots of small parcels of land with different people owning and overseeing that land and making those decisions. So it’s pretty difficult often to get all of your neighbors on board with a plan to remove invasive species," says Flower.
Difficult, but not impossible. Integrated approaches, education, and events like this one help spread the word— that we can all do our part to help Virginia’s native plants blossom each spring.
