2022_03_15 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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keep miconia contained – remember one of those management strategies is containment – trying to keep it in one area and that actually worked really well – BIISC really focused on the task force and then BIISC focused on those outlier populations and hitting those things that were outside that main corridor – that North Hilo to Puna main corridor – unfortunately with the recession in 2009-2010 all the funding for that dried up and it only takes a few years for a plant to – that makes 25 million seeds a year – to explode beyond even containment. So, at this point, miconia’s becoming more and more widespread – but one of the things that did come out of that is this concept of, you know, if we had gotten to miconia in 1976 instead of 1996 then there was a good chance that it could have been eradicated – that 20 years makes a huge difference and who’s looking at the plants that are out there that maybe are in that 1976 miconia stage that could be eradicated now if people were working on them. So that’s really our core mission is around plants so we have currently about a dozen or so target species that we are – and hopefully you don’t know any of them – you might have heard some of our alerts on a couple of them but we hope that most people don’t encounter them because we are working to eradicate those species so that they do not become the next albizia or, you know, wide spread species. So plant eradication, early detection eradication is one of our big programs. We also do some work with insect early detection so we are part of the Malamu Poepoe Program which is an inter-agency program where we do airport checks looking for things like africanized honey bees , murder hornets, red imported fire ants – the Department of Transportation – Hawaii Ant Lab – Department of Health are all involved in this as well, so, we’re looking for those species that we know are moving around the world and are very likely to end up in Hawaii and hoping to catch them early by being at those ports. We also – on the plant side of early detection – we have a Plant Pono program that’s kind of a big – several of our programs are kind of umbrella programs and Plant Pono is one of those – where we work with nurseries to try and get invasive plants out of the nursery trade so we have a nursery endorsement program. We also have an education program for the public on invasive plants and planting with non-invasive plants and we have a website – that’s sort of the anchor for that program – plantpono.org – and there you can look up a plant to find out if it’s likely to be invasive and you can also get recommendations for a plant that you’re looking for and it will return lots of selection of non-invasive plants and we also have a list of nurseries where you can buy those, um, so recognizing that we sort of work in that, you know, early detection and eradication area – we also know that our community, particularly on the Big Island has been left a lot with those widespread species and no one to really help them – sort of after it gets past a certain point, um, and, I mean, you’re probably all familiar with a couple of the big ones that we work on doing community support: albizia and little fire ants. So, um, our goal with these species is we just try to empower community folks to train people how to take care of it in their own neighborhoods, we hold volunteer events, we go out – we work with partners like HDOT and DPW and HELCO to try and clear corridors where there would be a lot of exit and egress during a natural disaster and so we really focused on working with communities and homeowners associations and that sort of thing with albizia, um, similarly, we have a training program for little fire ants where we bring the research-based strategies produced by Hawaii Ant Lab to the public and we do talks – teaching people how to properly treat for little fire ant and we also do backyard trainings if people organize their neighbors we will come out and we’ll do a year of treatment support where we do the first treatment with the community and then we sort of hand hold for the next few months and really try to get people to feel like they are very skilled fire ant fighters so that’s one of our big programs – it’s kind of been on hold for a couple of years – we’re excited to be starting that up again, um, and we also have a team that works on rapid ohia death – early detection – a rapid response of rapid ohia death – and there’s a lot of pieces to that – we work 6