Project Overview

Reports

Commodities

• Additional Plants: ornamentals

• Ecosystem: Ecosystem

• Natural Areas: wildlife

Target Pests

Practices

• Pest Management: behavioral control, cultivation, decision support system, prevention

• Natural Resources/Environment: biodiversity

Public Gardens as Sentinels against Invasive Plants (PGSIP) is an initiative calling upon public gardens across the United States and Canada to monitor their collections for plants escaping from cultivation and to share their data with the broader garden network to help prevent future plant escapes and invasions. We are seeking continued support from the North Central Integrated Pest Management Center (NCIPMC) to build of the success of the past four years and to support activities coordinated by the working group in 2022. Specifically, our objectives for 2022 are: 

1. Continue to expand use of PGSIP Guidelines and Database by public gardens across NCIPMC region; and
2. Host an in-person summit meeting focused on project progress and development of suitable communication thresholds for sentinel plant notices.

Following the work proposed for 2022, PGSIP will be ready to begin issuing public-facing information based on the data provided by public gardens in a consistent manner that reflects the needs and input of key issue stakeholders. 

We are excited to be able to supplement any funding awarded by NCIPMC this year with additional committed support from the Stanley Smith Horticultural Trust. The Trust is providing funding for staff support for specific activities associated with Ojective 1, as detailed fully in our proposal. NCIPMC funding will further support Midwest Invasive Plant Network  staff time to advance the objectives and venue/travel costs to host an in-person meeting.

This initiative is led by The Morton Arboretum (Kurt Dreisilker) and the Midwest Invasive Plant Network (Clair Ryan - staff, and Theresa Culley - board), and is been supported by a working group consisting of staff members from Chicago Botanical Garden, Missouri Botanical Garden, Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center, Royal Botanical Gardens – Ontario, and Denver Botanic Gardens.

Objective 1: Continue to expand the use of PGSIP Guidelines and Database by public gardens across the NCIPMC region

(timeframe: March - October 2022)

From our experience over the last few years, we have identified three phases of public garden engagement in PGSIP. The first phase is awareness when a key actor at a public garden (often a curator, horticulturalist, or a natural areas program manager) becomes aware of the PGSIP project, especially the guidelines and the database, and realizes that their institution could become involved. The second phase is institutional buy-in. During this phase, gardens discuss involvement in PGSIP and key actors (often institutional leaders) agree to commit resources to participation. There may be resource limitations encountered during this phase. The third and final phase is active engagement, when gardens begin working to generate their data and submit it to the PGSIP database. In 2022, we request support from the NCIPMC to continue work related to phase one - increasing awareness and understanding of the project among public gardens. We’re very excited to be able to supplement this with support from the Stanley Smith Horticultural Trust (SSHT) to help overcome some of the resource limitation concerns associated with phase two, enabling gardens to more readily arrive at phase three. The tables in this proposal only describe the activities we propose to NCIPMC, but we describe the whole effort here, as SSHT funding will be leveraged towards the goals of the PGSIP project.

With NCIPMC support, we propose to continue broad-net outreach efforts started in 2021 to raise awareness among North Central region gardens about the project and to encourage their participation. Our 2021 webinar series was effective, as indicated by positive feedback from participants and based on a marked up-tick in database registrations and data submissions. There are now 30 database registrants, representing 23 public gardens. The number of gardens that have submitted data to the PGSIP database has increased from four to seven, and the number of database records has increased from 526 to 709. There are also 87 recipients who have opted in to receive the project e-newsletter, which just launched this fall. We are encouraged by and hope to continue this growth towards “critical mass” of participation by continuing to raise project awareness through quarterly webinars and biannual e-newsletters. The content of the webinars and newsletters will be planned and reviewed by the PGSIP Working Group during its on-going monthly video conference meetings. SSHT funds will be used to initiate one-on-one work with the 12 gardens in the North Central region whose staff attended PGSIP webinars in 2021 and who have expressed interest in the project but have not yet collected or submitted their data. Specifically, PGSIP working group members will work with staff at these gardens to facilitate meetings, conduct background research on historic plant records, and to record and manage data. We are happy to provide NCIPMC with the full scope funded through SSHT upon request. Our goal is to have at least 20 gardens contributing data to the project by the end of 2022.

Objective 2: Host in-person summit meeting focused on project progress and development of suitable communication thresholds

(timeframe: November-December 2022)

As more gardens contribute data as a result of our work under Objective 1, the stage will be set to implement Objective 2 and host an in-person meeting among stakeholders. PGSIP developed out of a summit meeting of public gardens hosted by The Morton Arboretum in November of 2016. As in-person meetings are becoming feasible again following the availability of vaccines and other mitigating measures for COVID-19, we propose to host another in-person summit meeting for the project, but this time with an expanded audience including non-public garden stakeholders. The goal for the meeting will be to foster discussion around suitable communications thresholds and content for public notices based on PGSIP data. As more gardens contribute data, we expect to see trends in which gardens in the same region flag the same species in similar ways. Indeed, we are already seeing this with the data accumulated to date, as the above discussion of Amur cork tree demonstrates. Some of the taxa being reported by multiple gardens are well-known invasive species, but others are species that are not on the radar as invasive or have garnered only minimal attention. Among the latter set of species, PGSIP may be the first entity to draw attention to their invasive potential. There are important questions that we need to consider, such as: How many gardens in a geographic region should be reporting any given species to trigger release of a public notice? Does a species have to be reported as establishing outside of cultivation (e.g., in natural areas or rights-of-way) in at least one garden to warrant a public alert or notice? What context do we need to provide in public alerts or notices to prevent misunderstanding? What information can be provided in these notices to best inform decision making by non-garden stakeholders, such as plant propagators, production nurseries and landscape architects? While the PGSIP working group members, which largely includes representatives of public gardens, will consider these questions over the coming year in on-going monthly video conference meetings, we think it’s critical to receive and incorporate the perspectives of additional stakeholders, including representatives from green industry and invasive species councils, who are key audiences for any future notices from PGSIP. We also envision informing this process by reviewing the relevance and applicability of existing pest and invasive species notices, including NCIPMC’s Pest Alerts, as potential models.