The Green Room
Possible Solution to Stop Wilding Pines
This video appears in news.msn.co.nz and I thought you should see it.
http://news.msn.co.nz/video.aspx?videoid=34931556-0052-4667-972b-4b19f2afd1c0
If you cannot click on the link above, copy and paste the entire address above into your web browser.
There are a range of brews being used to kill wilding pines and the Queenstown chemical shown on TV1 looks promising.
Here in the Waimakariri Basin, Environment Canterbury used helicopter applied paraquat but although it defoliated the contorta pine trees, it killed most of the native plants (manuka, Dracophyllum, Ozothamnus), the pine trees regrew after about 6 months and are now back as strong as ever.
Our local ECan Biosecurity officer Errol Barnes yesterday advised us that they are abandoning Paraquat defoliant and instead will use metafuran which I think may be what the Queenstown DOC team are trialling.(I couldn't get the voice over)
If there is going to be application from a helicopter, the problem is that it is likely to kill all the plants including the native plants. This leaves a vacuum. Nature hates vacuums and to fill in the space, a whole range of weeds will grow up in this including pine seedlings....and the native plants will be lost perhaps forever.
My viewing of the Queenstown TV1 footage suggested that everything had been killed by the spraying operation.
With friends, we today pulled out and lopped 500 Douglas Fir from a short tussock-beech forest manuka shrubland. Yesterday with tourist volunteers,we pulled out 850 Pinus contorta from an amazing Dracophyllum-hebe-orchid-Chionochloa macra frost flat shrubland. In these delicate and fragile native plants communities nothing beats good old fashioned people powerand the spraying of a herbicide would be disastrous.
We just need more F&B volunteers to help us!
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