Interview: Emily Boedecker on Japanese Knotweed
Tuesday May 20, 2008
Mitch Wertlieb
Colchester, VT
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Over
the weekend, a group of people in Richmond got together to fight an invasive species that's
taking over the riverbanks. Richmond Land Trust Chair Brad Elliot helped in the
effort to locate Japanese Knotweed and said there was a lot of it:
(Elliot) "It was pretty extensive in some places, coming up through the sand, right along the water where normally you'd have plants that could hold the soil better. This stuff actually does a lousy job of that. There's nothing that eats it instead of Japanese beetles, deer don't go near it or anything. So it just comes up, it screens out all the good plants, then every year when we have a flood, the ice flows and the water come ripping through there, and just eat away at the bank, and a lot of people around town use that area, whether they're walking through there, riding bikes, photographing wildflowers. So that river, means a lot to people. "A river runs through it," and I guess that's true of Richmond."'
(Host)
Some two dozen volunteers came out to scour the flood plains around Richmond, joining the town's Conservation Commission, trail
committee, select board, and the Youth Conservation Corps.
Emily Boedecker of the Nature Conservancy says it's critical to identify invasive species like Knotweed.
Click listen to hear the entire interview.
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