Japanese stiltgrass tends to grow in homologous communities,
covering large areas and choking out all other vegetation. The problem is
especially obvious in sites cleared by humans—chiefly roads, crop fields, and
drainage sites.
After we kill the stilgrass in one of these patches, there’s
almost no remaining ground cover. These immediate landscape changes are
obvious, but we’re really more interested in observing how the areas regrow, to
assess whether our work is effective in the long-term. To gauge our baseline,
we’ve begun using portable GPS units and GIS software to map areas currently dominated
by Japanese stiltgrass. Basically, one of the project members walks the edge of
a stiltgrass patch carrying a GPS unit.
The unit tracks the path, which we then
import into a GIS program that superimposes the data points over a map of the
area. Keeping tabs on annual changes in these borders will allow us to
determine both whether we’ve successfully contained stiltgrass in areas where
we’re working and whether stiltgrass communities we haven’t reached are
continuing to expand.
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