Conservation Management

General Information

To ensure state personnel and volunteers are working efficiently, management aims to measure each field season’s aim to increase plants that support ground and burrow-nesting seabird habitats.

Seasonal efforts are documented around annual growth periods and measures 4 designated plots for percentages of Verbesina, other non-native plants, and native plants.

The Kure team randomly selects 2-meter quadrat sites within 4 plots—plots that were heavily-impacted by Verbesina–and assess how many of each plant covers what percentage in each selected quadrat.

Some Key Milestones of Conservation Management on Kure

1993-2002

DLNR would send 1-2 people from a few days to a month depending on logistical challenges. These rare visits were packed with critical actions such as montiroing the USCG station closure eradicating  rats,  setting up seabird monitoring protocols and conducting the first base;ine seabird counts. Longer camps started in 2000 with  one DLNR manager and two NMFS monk seal biologists, the initial work focused on banding birds, conducting counts, setting up the remote field station with solar electricity and communication devises as well as identifying habitat problems and ways to address to address them.

 

Some Key Metrics to Measure Success in the Field

Reduce Verbesina seed bank by preventing maturity in plants and removing them

Quantify Verbesina recruitment and seed bank persistence;

a) Count individual Verbesina plants removed during each treatment cycle,
b) Document Verbesina life stages to show the number of plants that have contributed to the seed bank.

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