As is common for an environmentalist, I spend time both planting and killing plants. I have helped plant many new oak trees on my campus here at Ohio State, but also help remove wild Japanese honeysuckle plants. This may seem counterintuitive; don’t we want as many plants as possible? However, some plants are beneficial to our eco-system other plants are doing it harm.
Japanese honeysuckle plants are an invasive species. They were brought here from eastern Asia in the 1800s. Now that Honeysuckles are in Ohio, they can take up too much space and nutrients, killing many of the other plants, and providing little food for animals. Invasive plant species have physical characteristics like fast growth, high fecundity (rapid reproduction), high dispersal rates, phenotypic plasticity (ability to alter growth form), and ability to tolerate wide range of climatic conditions. Invasive species do harm or damage to the environment they invade.
Invasive species can even cause non-invasives to go extinct. They can take up so much of the resources (water, nutrients, sun, space) that the other species have nowhere to grow at all. For example, black cohosh is a perennial that grows in U.S. woodlands. It has recently become endangered due to competition with invasive species and habitat destruction. Black cohosh has medical properties: it can be used to treat colds and as a pain killer. Now, we may lose it.
It is easy to see why plants are important when they directly benefit us in ways such as medicine. But it is important to keep plants from going extinct for other reasons. Biodiversity makes an ecosystem more productive because each plant has a role that it can fill. The more diversity in a community the more resilent it is to climate change or other disturbances. Invasive species threaten this by choking out other plants.
Beneficial plants, such as oak trees, have a niche to fill in the ecosystem. They provide food, habitat and ecosystem services for animals and live in balance with the life around them. It is difficult for animals like insects to flourish in an ecosystem if the plants that they need to survive are scarce. Planting those oak trees helped provide more space for animals such as birds and squirrels. But it did more than just help the living organisms. They will provides services or gives back to the eco-system. The oaks will help prevent erosion, clean water, capture carbon, release oxygen and regulate the climate around it. The tree roots go deep into the ground, helping hold the soil together, filtering water and bringing nutrients to the surface. Oak trees will be around for a lifetime.
So next time you put any plants in the ground, first make sure that they plants will provide benefits to you and your local eco-system!
Roland Bennett, Clean Water Fellow