 Recommendations:
- Federal and state agencies should increase efforts to block pathways by which invasives are likely to enter the country and the parks. The Park Service should use the parks to help make the case for new, strong, preventative measures. For example, barriers to nonnative fish should be placed in rivers and streams to prevent migration of alien species into park waters.
- Park visitors should be taught to remove nonnative seed sources from shoes, clothing, equipment, and vehicles. The Park Service should do more work on inventories of nonnative species along roads, trails, ditches, and other disturbed areas. Enforcement to stop unauthorized livestock grazing within parks should be heightened, and only certified weed-free hay should be permitted in parks.
- The Park Service should participate fully in the new U.S. Invasive Species Council, established by presidential executive order to serve as a forum for coordinating and enhancing invasives programs with other agencies. NPS should recommend additions to the federal prohibited-animal-and-plant-species list, federal noxious-weed and -seed laws, and comparable state and local statutes.
Also, the Service should provide the public with warnings about the availability of identified invaders such as purple loosestrife, porcelainberry, and Japanese knotweed, which are still sold at nurseries and garden centers in many states. For example, park administrators could ask local governments to include educational leaflets about invasive species with utility bills sent to residents of communities near parks.
- The Park Service should continue and strengthen its involvement in multi-agency, public/private efforts such as the Pulling Together Initiative (an innovate National Fish and Wildlife Foundation project to fund weed removal), the Federal Interagency Committee on the Management of Noxious and Exotic Weeds, and the Salt Cedar Biological Control Consortium (aimed at holistic ecological restoration of southwestern riparian areas in conjunction with salt cedar biocontrol).
- The Park Service and Congress should continue to support, establish, and fund more interagency/agency Exotic Plant Management Teams or "rapid response teams."
- The Park Service should play the strongest role possible in intergovernmental efforts to keep highly damaging zebra mussels and other freshwater invaders out of the West.
- The Park Service should continue to expand its program to propagate and use native plants for revegetation after road maintenance and other construction projects, including cooperative efforts on neighboring lands.
- Working cooperatively with other organizations, the Park Service should manage overabundant populations of native species, such as elk in some western parks, in a way that keeps these species from disrupting natural ecological processes and harming other animals and plants.
- The Park Service should establish geographic tracking systems to monitor new infestations of nonnative species and diseases and should share this information with managers of adjacent lands.
- More research is needed into methods of transmitting nonnative diseases.
The control of exotic species is labor intensive and must be applied using an ecosystem approach. Invasive species populations transgress park boundaries, so treatment within parks alone does not remove the threat of re-establishment from populations outside the parks. Partnerships with park neighbors combined with a highly educated volunteer workforce are crucial to the successful control of invasive species.
The National Park Service 1996 report, "Preserving Our Natural Heritage: A Strategic Plan for Managing Invasive Nonnative Plants on National Park System Lands" details ways to address this issue. Each element of the plan should be thoroughly implemented, and the Park Service should develop similar strategic plans for the control of both terrestrial and aquatic invasive animals and microbes.
Intensive education programs targeted at park visitors and neighbors should help in control and prevention. Such efforts could prevent the spread of species, such as the zebra mussel, into more western parks. Each park should have its own specific invasives—prevention and management plan.
The Park Service, as part of the Natural Resource Challenge, has established Exotic Plant Management Teams throughout the country to address invasive species. These teams have been extremely successful, and the Park Service should continue to seek, and Congress should provide, increased funding to address this problem.
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