Maura Vander Putten was a 2024 participant of the Catskill Science Collaborative Fellowship Program, coordinated by Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies.
This summer, I had the incredible opportunity to participate in a fellowship through the Catskill Science Collaborative. I was able to live in the Catskills near my study sites thanks to my advisor, Dr. George Kraemer, who provided me housing for the month and a half we were collecting data. The scenery was absolutely beautiful, and I am grateful to have been able to live so close to nature. Coming from Long Island, it was quite a unique experience for me.
For our project, which will serve as my undergraduate senior project at SUNY Purchase, Dr. Kraemer and I studied the dispersal of six non-native plant species along hiking trails in the Catskills Park, meaning we got to hike 24 mountains and trails all across the Catskills and search for non-native plant species along the way.
Non-native plants are those that are introduced from another ecosystem. They become invasive species when they have few natural predators or have a significant competitive advantage over other plants, such as emerging earlier in the spring. They then can infest large areas. These monocultures prevent native species from growing and disrupt ecosystems.
In our study, we were looking for six invasive species: garlic mustard, Japanese knotweed, Japanese barberry, periwinkle, honeysuckle, and mile-a-minute vine. We hoped to compare their current distributions to previous censuses to learn more about the way they each disperse and what trends we can see to better predict further dispersal. These data would then inform land management decisions made by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
Some of our hikes were truly rigorous and tested my physical condition as well as my mental ability to count hundreds of garlic mustard stems in each parking lot. During some hikes, I would swear I could never climb another mountain as I scrambled up rocky ledges at elevations in the thousands of meters, but every time I took my lunch break at the peak, I felt an overwhelming sense of peace. The views were so beautiful I couldn't help but forget how exhausted I was. It was always worth it, no matter what I said on the climb up.
We mostly found garlic mustard and Japanese barberry, and on only one trail, periwinkle. Of the six species we looked for, garlic mustard was easily the most common. Its flowers started in the parking lots and slowly trickled up along the trail, usually only for the first half a mile or so. They would often stop there. Garlic mustard disperses a very short distance — essentially within a foot of itself, creating this slow, climbing method of infestation. These plants also struggle to grow above a certain elevation, somewhere around 1,200 meters, according to my research, which further helps to contain them and preserve the state of Catskills’ ecosystems. We typically found Japanese barberry in single patches, somewhat randomly, and periwinkle appeared on one trail in a large patch spanning a few meters.
All of this is a good sign for the Catskills. The majority of these high-risk invasives are not present at all in disturbed parts of the Catskills forests, and only one is in significant quantities. Garlic mustard poses a significant threat, but its poor ability to spread is something we can take advantage of. Garlic mustard dispersal is likely aided by hikers who get seeds from the parking lot stuck in their shoes and then accidentally carry these hitchhikers up trails. Boot brush stations, on which you scrape your shoes to remove seeds, may prove extremely effective in this case. This simple addition to trailheads, along with outreach alerting hikers of this potential for spreading invasives, may be enough to combat garlic mustard’s spread through the Catskills.
Maura Vander Putten, an undergraduate student at SUNY Purchase, studied and mapped six invasive species’ dispersals along hiking trails in the Catskills region in ArcGIS. Her analysis has larger implications for the health of forest ecosystems containing trails and provides methods of combating invasive spread throughout them.
