I've kinda had a similar perspective until buckthorn. Buckthorn is essentially eradicating native Big Woods forest, transforming forest that comprises an open understory with high canopies into dense tangles of buckthorn that choke out anything else. It also leads to these boom-bust nitrogen cycles that wreak havoc on the soil.
Many of these forests were just fine until buckthorn arrived. The problem isn't with buckthorn per se, it's in the destruction that it causes on native ecosystems. If the buckthorn was just here or there, an addition to the landscape, it might be fine, but it's not.
A solution to buckthorn overgrowth can't come soon enough because mechanical solutions, while effective, are very laborious.
Maybe there's something that could be imported to keep it in check (I recall reading buckthorn has some kind of highly specialized moth or something that eats it in its native range) but regardless of why, it's a problem.
> I've kinda had a similar perspective until buckthorn. Buckthorn is essentially eradicating native Big Woods forest, transforming forest that comprises an open understory with high canopies into dense tangles of buckthorn that choke out anything else. It also leads to these boom-bust nitrogen cycles that wreak havoc on the soil.
Buckthorn is the devil's plant. IIRC, it's a hedge plant, and literally turns a forest into an impassible hedge.
> Maybe there's something that could be imported to keep it in check (I recall reading buckthorn has some kind of highly specialized moth or something that eats it in its native range) but regardless of why, it's a problem.
IIRC, they're close to approving something like that for garlic mustard (which kind of does the same thing as buckthorn, except on the forest floor, and often gets bad after you deal with buckthorn). They've had to do a lot of testing to make sure it's very specialized and doesn't cause another invasive pest problem.
> A solution to buckthorn overgrowth can't come soon enough because mechanical solutions, while effective, are very laborious.
In Minnesota, they’ve been using goats. It’s still labor intensive, but the labor is performed by goats. Still, there are only so many goats, and there’s a lot of buckthorn.
I love the Big Woods ecosystem, and there’s very little of it left :/
This. My own "invasive is bad" epiphany was with honeysuckle in a SE Michigan park. They had grown so thick that nothing was able to grow in the soil under them - which had turned to dust, like the surface of the moon.
Many of these forests were just fine until buckthorn arrived. The problem isn't with buckthorn per se, it's in the destruction that it causes on native ecosystems. If the buckthorn was just here or there, an addition to the landscape, it might be fine, but it's not.
A solution to buckthorn overgrowth can't come soon enough because mechanical solutions, while effective, are very laborious.
Maybe there's something that could be imported to keep it in check (I recall reading buckthorn has some kind of highly specialized moth or something that eats it in its native range) but regardless of why, it's a problem.