Natural Connections – Weeding out undesirables
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Cumbernauld Living Landscape has a new Intern! Katherine is with us for 12 weeks surveying Invasive Non-native species on the three Natural Connections sites. Her work will let us compare a previous survey of 2015 to let us see how far it has spread, if our volunteer days of clearing it have made an impact and it will map precisely where each plant is for us to be able to clear it out in the future.
During the training phase Katherine has had to learn how to identify and record each non-native plant, her list also included other species which fortunately we do not have in Cumbernauld such as Giant Hogweed and Water Hyacinth.
On our volunteer day on Sunday there we came across a plant called Azolla at the Sustainable Urban Drainage system SUDs pond in the Glen. This is a very aggressive pond weed which is able to grow and duplicate its size within 24hrs; it also has a sunscreen built into the plants DNA which stops the suns UV light from damaging it. The only way to clear it is a cold winter with temperatures getting below -15â°C. This plant may have been brought in on the legs of a bird or even on fishing gear which had not been cleaned.
We’ll be keeping an eye in this over the next few months and I will keep you up to date on our Facebook page – Cumbernauld Living Landscape