News

If you are walking the beaches of Oregon in the next year and find a bright yellow card with Spartina Dispersal Study printed at the top, please do what the card asks—you’ll be helping PSU scientists better understand the spread of invasive species through ocean currents.

The drift cards are a project of the PSU Center for Lakes and Reservoirs to identify likely locations for invasion of Spartina, commonly known as cordgrasses. Released monthly at the mouths of Willapa Bay in Washington and Humboldt Bay and San Francisco Bay in California, the biodegradable wooden cards float on the water surface and are carried by the ocean currents, much as seeds or plant fragments would travel. Those who find a card are asked to call or email the program with its location and identification number.

There are large-scale populations of Spartina in both Washington and California, but only one small population is known to exist in Oregon waters—on the Siuslaw River near Florence. It is being treated.

Spartina was brought to the West Coast for erosion control and unintentionally in ships’ ballast water and in oyster packing material. Over the past few decades scientists have recognized that the exotic plant poses a huge threat to flood channels and local animal habitats as its dense root systems trap sediments.

Spartina is just one of a long list of non-native invasive species threatening the environment and economy of the West Coast. Center for Lakes and Reservoirs scientists recently helped complete a survey of the lower Columbia River, which identified a total of 81 non-native species, including fish, aquatic plants, crustaceans, and worms that have been introduced since the mid-1800s. The research revealed that a new introduced species was discovered about every five years from the 1880s to the 1970s. However, in the past decade, a new introduced invertebrate species was discovered about every five months.

The University is taking its focus on aquatic invasive species to a national level through a recent partnership with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). The partnership will create a new Aquatic Bioinvasion Research and Policy Institute at PSU to assist in the understanding and management of biological invasions in coastal marine and freshwater ecosystems from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts. The research institute will be jointly administered by Gregory Ruiz, director of SERC’s Marine Invasion Research Program in Edgewater, Md., and Mark Sytsma, director of PSU’s Center for Lakes and Reservoirs.