Tracking invasive plant species in the Chesapeake Bay watershed

Seeing the impacts that invasive plants can have on native wildlife for me is kind of what got me into invasive plants. Today, we are in Maryland's Chesapeake Bay watershed. Right outside of Annapolis. I'm doing some vegetation sampling. So I'll be measuring all of the vegetation from ground level through the canopy just to see which species are here. And then looking more specifically at the tree species and their diameter to see how much overstory there is. And then looking at canopy coverage to see how much light is reaching the understory through the trees that are in the canopy. I'm comparing unrestored streams to restored streams because we're trying to see whether restoration is promoting invasion. In a lot of cases, restoration is more focused on the instream and preventing erosion on the streams within the Chesapeake Bay watershed, especially with the concerns about nitrogen and phosphorus and sediment loads that could be entering the bay. I'm finishing up my second and final sampling season for vegetation. But at the same time, I am just deploying my second set of bio acoustic recorders to record the stream sounds and the soundscape along some of my restored and unrestored streams. The recorders are set to record 15 minutes of every hour for every day for a year, which is a ton of data. And within that, we're looking to see whether the soundscape. So some of all of the sound making species, the birds, the frogs, the insects, how those might differ between restored and unrestored streams. So trying to see along that gradient of invasion, whether there's like a tipping point for where the soundscape really starts to change. I feel very lucky to have inherited the dataset that I have, where I have information on all of the background and the design plans and the management and monitoring plans for all of the restoration projects that I'm looking at. So I'm able to go in and see, Okay, maybe this project fared better than this one. Why might that be? And then being able to use that data from that project to say, Okay, this is what they did. This is how we can maybe implement that and other future restoration projects to improve how restoration projects handle invasive species.