Invasive species impact native soundscapes

So the invasive species issue is everything from local to global. It's a global issue and that it is the result of species being translocated from other areas, often from other continents, but not always the case. We're currently surrounded by them in this park. We have them in our waterways, in rivers and oceans. They now exist on every continent on the planet. They change the way ecosystems function, have hundreds of billions of dollars in economic issues. And so it's a global issue that has local impact. And one that the Invasive Species Collaborative is really keen to tackle and one that we feel we're well positioned to because of our very transdisciplinary nature. We're not just looking at this as an ecologist, or a biologist, but really in a very integrated way that we hope can make, you know, in the long term have meaningful impacts on the ecosystems of our kids or our grandkids. And I think that feels really good to have that kind of impact. Soundscapes are the sounds of the entire environment. But we're also thinking about soundscapes as how might plants be changing the structure of the soundscape and how sound travels. We have paired sites where one is invaded, one is not invaded, and we have placed acoustic recorders at each of those sites, and they record five minutes every hour every day. And then we're also taking other in the field measurements such as the different plant species that are there, the densities of each plant, so we can try to quantify how the different plants and their densities are affecting the soundscape. Restoration ecology focuses on how we can set an area on a trajectory to have a diverse and resilient native plant community. If we have an area full of invasive species, we want to treat. Usually, there are established treatment regimes that use herbicides and physical removal. Other options at the landscape scale are biocontrol, so we can introduce fungi or insects or some other natural enemy of the invasive plant. We hope that that can suppress the plant over a larger area. So I feel like I want my research to be very much stakeholder informed and stakeholder driven. And help make agriculture more resilient, more sustainable, especially in the face of climate change. And Virginia Tech, it started off as an AG school. So it has a really good agricultural program. We have a massive extension team. The Virginia Cooperative has a lot of extension activities, and that's what I look forward to every day when I do my research. I feel like when I come to work every day, I'm making progress. And Virginia is making some really important progress in the invasive species world. I'd like to think I played a small incremental role in that progress, but one that feels meaningful.