APIPP News: Register for APIPP’s April 28 Spring Partner Meeting; Record Number of HWA Surveys Completed; New Lake Maps Posted; Recording of Native Pl

APIPP News: Register for APIPP’s April 28 Spring Partner Meeting; Record Number of HWA Surveys Completed; New Lake Maps Posted; Recording of Native Pl

Dear Partners,

Happy Spring! Plants are beginning to send up shoots, and those bright yellow flowers you see by the roadside may be the invasive spring ephemeral, lesser celandine (Ficaria verna). You can find information about this plant, and other common invasive plants in the Adirondacks, on our website.

Please make sure to register for APIPP’s April 28 Spring Partner Meeting. You can find more information about the meeting below. Below you will also find a link to the recording of last week’s webinar on native plant landscaping as well as links to new maps posted for more than fifty lakes in the southern Adirondacks. Also, please read below for the impressive, near-final results of the winter hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA) surveys.

April 28: APIPP’s Virtual Spring Partner Meeting and Strategic Planning Update, 9:30am-12:00pm

Please register here to join APIPP's Spring 2022 Partner Meeting. The meeting is a great opportunity to connect with partners from across the Adirondacks and to learn more about invasive species.
 

Our featured speaker will be former APIPP manager, Brendan Quirion. Brendan will share his recent research findings about the serious impacts of forest pests on forest-based carbon sequestration. To read the full paper “Insect and Disease Disturbances Correlate With Reduced Carbon Sequestration in Forests of the Contiguous United States,” click here.
 

The last hour of the meeting will be dedicated to refining APIPP's strategic plan and getting feedback on partners’ priorities for the next five years. Many thanks to everyone who provided input on the strategic plan via APIPP’s strategic planning survey earlier this year. Thanks to the hard work of the planning committee, we will have a draft vision, mission, and goals to share with all of our partners in advance of the meeting. We look forward to a discussion about how you can help contribute to advancing the invasive species goals for the region.

Thank You HWA Volunteers!

Forest Pest Hunter volunteers concluded winter surveys for HWA on April 10. It was an amazing effort. Volunteers adopted 114 trails and entered over 400 survey results, including 21 confirmed findings of HWA, into iMapInvasives. Wow! Eighteen volunteers have already provided us with an estimate of the hours they spent surveying, and the total exceeds 350 hours. That is the equivalent of 10 weeks of staff time, time APIPP staff would never have been able to spend searching for HWA. Thank you volunteers!

We asked all volunteers to stop surveying by April 10 as the insect enters its mobile stage of life around mid-April. All forest visitors should be aware that HWA can be transferred on clothing and footwear from about mid-April through early July. Take care if hiking through HWA-infested areas during this time period and clean all gear when you return home.

New Maps of Southern Adirondack Lakes Now Available

Each year APIPP contracts with a professional crew to survey Adirondack lakes for aquatic invasive species. In summer 2021, Adirondack Research surveyed and mapped more than fifty lakes in the southern Adirondacks for APIPP. The full report from Adirondack Research can be found here. Maps for the individual lakes surveyed can be found here.

Recording of April 6 “Native Plants for Adirondack Landscapes” Webinar Now Posted

Many thanks to native plant expert, Emily DeBolt, for providing an informative and engaging webinar last week on native plants for Adirondack landscapes. More than 100 people joined the webinar. We are excited to share the link to the recording of this webinar with you. Happy gardening!

Tammara