- Author: Chris McDonald
I most often work with land managers in Southern California and one thing that surprises me is the size of restoration and management projects. One survey of land managers in Orange County found the average size of a restoration treatment is 6 ac. with the largest restoration project in the survey being just over 30 ac. (Dickens 2011).
Often our wildland restoration treatments are treating weeds with herbicides and then planting plants or seeding seeds. This sounds awfully similar to another type of land management. In agriculture this is standard operating procedure nearly every single planting season, and in some cases, several times a year on the same field.
For inspiration, I am looking...
- Author: Andrew Johnson
- Author: Marcelo Moretti
- Author: Brad Hanson
Several field experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of pre-emergence herbicides, herbicide rates, and tankmix combinations at different locations in the Central Valley of California and to compare the efficacy of burndown herbicides in mixture with different pre-emergence herbicides. The same treatments were used in three studies located in Fresno, Merced, and Colusa counties. Only data from the Merced county site is presented due to low weed densities at the Fresno and Colusa county sites.
The experiment was conducted in a mature almond orchard with solid-set sprinkler irrigation, and very sandy soil (95% sand) near Delhi, CA. Treatments were applied on February 10, 2012 using a CO2 pressurized back pack...
- Author: Rebecca Miller-Cripps
Everywhere you turn these days, the term “citizen science” is in use. The National Wildlife Federation (NWF) dedicates a page of its website to the topic. In July, the Ecological Society of America (ESA) published a supplemental journal devoted wholly to the topic of citizen science—its history, current status, and potential for the future. When staying with friends last week, I had my morning coffee in a mug labeled “Central Valley Winter Raptor Count – 2008-2011,” an excellent example of citizen science.
But, what do we mean by “citizen science”? Historically, the practice of involving members of the public in various scientific projects was viewed as an opportunity to...
- Author: Brad Hanson
A quick post today to share a few links and reposts that I found interesting recently.
The first is a link to a video on the television program, CBS Sunday Morning. In this program from a week ago, weeds were the focus. Click here for a link to the video. The main focus (and most interesting to me as a herbicide resistance researcher) was the main segment where Dr. Stanley Culpepper from the University of Georgia talked very frankly about the issues that...
- Author: Brent A Holtz
- Author: Mick Canevari
- Posted by: Gale Perez
In June we visited a first-leaf almond orchard that had started the season growing normally, but as the root system expanded, the trees’ growth became rapidly stunted (Fig. 1). The newly expanding shoot tips showed ‘little leaf’ symptoms (Fig. 2) characteristic of glyphosate injury, with an incredible proliferation of shoots (Fig. 3) growing from the same point on the scaffolds.
After investigating crop rotations, we learned that the trees showing symptoms had followed alfalfa newly planted the previous year that had been removed after only one year. Trees from the same nursery and farmed by the same grower were planted on the other half of the ranch in ground following three years of alfalfa...