BMS-Strike Team Japanese Aralia Eradication Project

The Japanese Aralia Eradication Program is a very exciting project that takes advantage of a fairly unique position that Hopewell Valley is in.  Because of the currently fairly small and scattered populations of Japanese Aralia in the valley, we have a special chance to entirely eradicate an invasive species.  FoHVOS Stewardship Director, Mike Van Clef, says that The FoHVOS Strike Team have been actively identifying and eliminating Japanese Aralia plants whenever and wherever they come across them in the area.  Because of these preemptive actions taken on both public and private land, the task of keeping this invasive plant under control has been substantially alleviated. These opportunities have come with help from private individuals in the community cooperating with FoHVOS and engaging in protecting the environmental health of their community by reporting sightings, allowing access to their private lands, granting permission of plant treatment, and even actually going out themselves to expunge invasives.

However, it was not always smooth sailing for the Strike Team and the eradication effort.  Hurricane Sandy downed many trees and made maneuvering through the local forests difficult.  Without funding from Bristol-Myers Squibb, it would have proved very difficult to clear the trees in areas where Aralia had been identified.  The funding provided the ability to contract industrial equipment to remove the trees and enable the continuation of the treatment of Aralia plants.  It is possible that, had there been a longer break in the Strike Team work, the Aralia populations would have succeeded in rapidly colonizing the land and beginning to exclude native species, squandering our advantage of the currently low Aralia populations and making it that much more difficult to eradicate this invasive species. For that reason, it is a great feet to have avoided the outcome that Sandy could have made possible.

Surprisingly, and rather conveniently, possibly the largest concentration of Aralia was located on some of FoHVOS’s own land at the Albahary Preserve.  Dr. Van Clef theorizes that the invasion could have originated from the gardens of Hopewell Borough’s “Castle”, where the original Victorian owner brought in beautiful and exotic, but some now invasive, species for display.  It has an unusual spiny appearance that makes it visually interesting and could have been a piece of pride for the original Castle owners. Now, however, one of the residents of the Castle apartments is helping in the eradication effort by spraying his own nearby Aralia plants with herbicide.

Japanese Aralia, as with other invasive species, are dangerous in non-native environments because they are, as Dr. Van Clef put it, not a part of that area’s food web in a complete way.  The invaded environment is new to the invasive plant, and so there are no counter-balancing sources that exist, such as pests or pathogens, that would usually keep a native plant in check.  In a fully native environment, all kinds of different species balance one another out, but invasives throw off that balance. This project aims to work towards restoring the natural balance of the ecosystem by eliminating an invasive species.