The Alaska Invasive Species Workshop Oct. 27-29 in Juneau will highlight invasive species management and issues in Southeast Alaska and around the state.
Keynote speaker John Hudson, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife in Juneau, will offer a public lecture at 6 p.m. Oct. 26 at the Mendenhall Valley Library. His talk is titled “Juneau’s Green Invasion: Non-Native Plants That Threaten Local Ecosystems.”The workshop in the next two days will address Southeast concerns, including cruise ship ballast water and management of garlic mustard, knotweed and Didemnum vexillum, a marine tunicate that has shown up in Sitka. Several presentations will focus on elodea, a fast-growing aquatic plant that can reduce the quality of fish habitat and create difficulties for recreational boaters and for pilots landing on lakes. Discovering elodea at Lake Hood in Anchorage this past summer was a special concern, said workshop coordinator Gino Graziano, since the dense mats of elodea presented navigation challenges to pilots at the busy floatplane base. Planes also can easily transport the aquatic plant to other lakes.
Other presentations will cover how to prevent and manage invasive species across international and domestic boundaries and the Alaska invasive weeds identification app.
The agenda and registration information are at www.alaskainvasives.org. The workshop was organized by the Alaska Committee for Noxious and Invasive Plant Management and the Alaska Invasive Species Group, informal groups composed of agencies and organizations statewide. The University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension Service will host the workshop at Elizabeth Peratrovich Hall in downtown Juneau.
