Invasives, beware! Michigan gets organized about fighting exotic species

Invasive Species in top image, from left to right: Japanese knotweed, European frog-bit, Black swallow-wort, Garlic mustard, Phragmites. Photos via Creative Commons.

You’ve probably heard the names of a few of the invasive species that plague Michigan: zebra mussels, emerald ash borers, phragmites. But those well-known unwanted visitors just scratch the surface of the 75 invasive species the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) has identified in the state.

And if it sounds difficult just to keep track of those species, controlling or eliminating them makes for a truly Herculean task.

But over the past decade, collaborative efforts in Michigan to keep invasives in check have been increasingly successful. Through cooperative invasive species management areas, or CISMAs (pronounced SIZ-muhs), land and water stewards form regional partnerships that engage local, state and federal governments, nonprofits, businesses and individual citizens in collaborative efforts to attack the invasives that affect their regions.

The organized approach is a considerable step up from what came before: isolated efforts by individual entities. DNR invasive species coordinator Sue Tangora describes the old way as a “shotgun approach.”

“You can only do so much on your own property,” she says. “If you spray your dandelions and your neighbor doesn’t, you get more dandelions. It’s kind of a common thread that we all share, that something’s affecting us collectively as a community, and a CISMA is really the bridge that brings them all together.”

The United States Forest Service (USFS) funded Michigan’s first CISMA, the Western Peninsula Invasives Coalition, in 2006. That CISMA covers three of the westernmost counties in the Upper Peninsula. Initially, CISMAs grew primarily in the UP and northern Lower Peninsula, thanks to USFS funding for invasive management efforts on the plentiful federal forestland in those areas.

But southern Michigan had plenty of invasives too, and little federal land to attract USFS funding. The southern half of the state got its first big shot at the CISMA game in 2014, when governor Rick Snyder proposed and the Michigan legislature approved $5 million in funding for invasive species management, with $3.6 million earmarked for grants to be administered by the DNR through the new Michigan Invasive Species Grant Program (MISGP).

In handing out MISGP grants, Tangora says, “one of our big focuses was to fill in the state with additional CISMAs.” The funding and grant allocations repeated last year, and a total of 17 CISMAs now cover the entire Upper Peninsula and most of the Lower Peninsula. All of them bridge multiple counties.

“Invasive species don’t follow jurisdictional boundaries,” Tangora says. “They go anywhere. This helps us to take away those jurisdictional boundaries, deal with a species where it’s at and get more proactive as well.”

Click on the colored areas in the map below to find out more about CISMAs across Michigan.

Weeds in the West

Although CISMAs have caught on widely in Michigan in recent years, the state certainly didn’t pioneer the concept.

The idea originated in the rangelands of the western United States in the early ‘90s, where in many states' landowners are required by law to eradicate certain plants. The original CISMAs didn’t go by that name at all; they were called cooperative weed management areas, or CWMAs. That’s because the biggest concern out west is noxious weeds–native plants that interfere with agriculture and natural resources, as opposed to invasive species, which are introduced from other areas.

Chris Evans is an extension forester and research scientist at the University of Illinois who has worked in invasive species management for over a decade. He says CWMAs originally formed as a practical way to fulfill legal requirements for treating certain weeds.

“In an area where you might have quite a few landowners that are dealing with some of the same issues, by having a cooperative weed management area together they can jointly get spray equipment, get herbicides and coordinate spraying...all at once,” Evans says. “It was a money-saving thing.”

CWMAs began to really take off when the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) began funding them through its Pulling Together Initiative in 1997. Evans says that spurred a lot of folks to start creating more partnerships within their regions in order to meet NFWF’s requirements for funding. In the process, he says, “we started understanding that [CWMAs] really work.”

Nonetheless, it still took some time for the concept to catch on farther east. New York implemented the idea with its own name–Partnerships for Regional Invasive Species Management, or PRISMs–in 2005.

Since then, Evans says, the number of such organizations has “exploded” across the eastern U.S. However, he adds, the approach in Michigan is somewhat different due to more complex interactions between private and government landowners, and limited government infrastructure for managing unwanted plants.

“In the east, the shift went away from just saving funds to control invasives,” Evans says. “We’re working together to prioritize the right places, aligning people’s efforts so we’re reducing redundancy, as well as bringing messages out to the public and focusing on education. It really became a multi-faceted approach to dealing with invasive plants out of necessity.”

With that came a shift in nomenclature as well. Although there are still a few CWMAs in Michigan, most are now identified as CISMAs.

“That word ‘weed’ is somewhat outdated, because some of these groups do more than fight plants,” Tangora says. “They do aquatic invasive species and some of our forest pest invasives. We looked at it and we said, ‘It’s much easier to say CISMA than it is to say CWMA.’”

Sue Tangora

CISMAs in action

Since they’ve caught on in Michigan, CISMAs have done some remarkable work. In some cases they’ve effectively caught brand-new invasives in the state before they even have a chance to get out of hand. Tangora references a recent incident when West Michigan CISMA coordinator Drew Rayner reported only the second known sighting of the invasive Chinese yam in the state. (See Q&A sidebar.)

“That’s the great thing about [CISMAs],” Tangora says. “You get them looking for the new things, so we don’t have one more new thing we have to manage in Michigan.”

Although important, that victory is still small compared to the large-scale warfare some CISMAs have waged against certain invasives. Tangora points to the U.P., where she says CISMAs are “effectively going to eradicate phragmites from the landscape.”

The nonprofit Upper Peninsula Resource Conservation and Development Council (UPRC&D Council), a partner in all five U.P. CISMAs, has since 2013 obtained multiple federal and state grants to attack the invasive reed. The UPRC&D Council then issued subawards to U.P. CISMAs, funding treatment of over 2,000 acres of phragmites over the past three years. The plants have mostly been concentrated along the Lake Michigan shoreline and haven’t yet spread inland as much as they have downstate.

“When you look at it on a Great Lakes regional viewpoint, we actually have a pretty good chance of having some success in controlling it, compared to other places,” says UPRC&D executive director Darcy Rutkowski. “If you’re living in the Detroit or Ann Arbor area, it’s kind of iffy.”

That’s not to say that the downstate CISMAs aren’t throwing everything they’ve got at stopping phragmites’ more entrenched presence. Each CISMA sets its sights on addressing the biggest threats to its region in the best way it can. Those strategies are effective due to the diverse talents they bring to the table, which can include just about any Michigander who lives within a CISMA’s boundaries.

Tangora encourages those interested in getting involved with invasive species management to identify and reach out to their local CISMA through the Michigan Invasive Species Coalition. She says the U.P. CISMAs’ work with phragmites proves that there’s no challenge too big for Michigan CISMAs.

“It can be done,” she says. “If you have the organizational structure and you have the buy-in, you can do this. You may not be able to solve every invasive species problem, but you’re going to have a lot more success when you work together.”

This story is a part of a statewide Invasive Species Community Impact Series edited by Nina Ignaczak. Support for this series is provided by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.