2019 09-10 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – September 10, 2019 passed. There’s everything right here and there otherwise nothing – it would just been about eliminated on Mauna Kea. One word did it all. Any questions? NP: Thank you for clarifying. KS: Anything else? TS: No, I think that’s it as far as that. What I have is just something I wanted to share and it was a presentation at the University – back in April. And I’m just gonna read it – it’s a little bit of notes but I posted it for I think if you saw this and all that – I just thought it was really interesting and it’s – the topic of that night was what is slowing forest restoration at Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge and this was by Dr. Evans from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the project – it started nearly 30 years ago and the managers at Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge planted 400,000 acacia koa trees in abandoned pastures to facilitate forest regeneration. Their goal was to restore native forests in order to increase native bird populations at an altitude where avian malaria is rare. While planting trees – the planted trees seems to grow well – there have been very little natural recruitment of native understory plants, you know, pilo and so forth and in this talk Dr. Evan will discuss the various barriers that inhibited the development of native forest. So, ah, some of the key notes I got out of it is – the barriers that inhibit the native forest development was the lack of seed dispersal – cause there’s no birds – competition with grasses – lack of plant establishment sites – that’s a really interesting one there, you know, and then the harsh micro-climate which is all the same in the palila habitat and then altered nutrient dynamics and the lack of fungal communities. So it’s a couple of things on here that really interested me was the lack of plant establishment sites and the altered nutrients dynamics and the lack of the fungal communities and the reason why that is – cause they found out that the best recruitment for other native species was the trees that had a good basal structure – which means lichen and mosses and things like that – and I guess that area in the rocky areas where the cattle didn’t go cause it was grazed for, you know, a hundred plus years, that the few remaining ohia trees and stuff – their structure seems to have a lot more native plants there and all the koa trees that they’ve planted over all the years they haven’t been able to establish any native plants in those areas – so it’s one of two things that was brought up is that because of all the kikuyu grass that chokes everything out and they’re using a lot of herbicide to keep it down – how is that affecting the soil biology – so it turns out that the two things do, you know, invasive plants and things do alter soil and there’s no definitive data on herbicide use so it’s neither here or there but there’s not proof whether it is or isn’t that, that also affects the biology of the soil and that’s just something I wanted to mention tonight here because we’re using more and more of this stuff worldwide, ah, we’re using this in our watersheds and now, you know, fire breaks and so 17