May 5, 2022 at 12:46 p.m.
WHIP annual meeting held in Tomahawk
WHIP annual meeting held in Tomahawk
WHIP, founded in 2010, is complied of many groups. This includes individuals, associations, county organizations, towns, tribal and federal entities. As of 2022, the group consists of 16 formal partners. All partners have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to show their support for WHIP. Those MOUs are renewed every 5 years.
Rosie Page, WHIP coordinator, kicked off the 2022 annual meeting by highlighting the activities in which WHIP has been involved in the last year. The group is entirely grant funded, she said, other than the organizational support from their fiscal sponsor, Lumberjack RC&D. In 2021, grants also came through the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR), Wisconsin Public Service (WPS), and the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI), which are federal funds the group was able to secure.
One of the big projects from last year, Page said, was supported by a GLRI grant through the U.S. Forest Service. This funding supported a large media campaign. This campaign, called Play Clean Go, was aimed at increasing awareness of invasive species on land, or terrestrial invasive species (TIS). Most conservation-minded people, she said, are aware of aquatic invasive species (AIS), but less attention has been given to TIS in the past.
With a print media campaign, it was estimated there were over 200,000 impressions gained for the Play Clean Go program. With radio advertising, Page said the estimate was over 24,000. The group also took over billboards, in Rhinelander and Tomahawk for four weeks from June to September. Lamar, the owner of the billboards, gave WHIP another four weeks of advertising on those billboards because of their nonprofit status. These billboards were estimated to have provided 502,980 impressions. Page said, in her research into marketing, she found it seemed people were paying less attention to online ads and trusting them less, while marketing such as billboards tend to catch people's attention in a much bigger way.
"In our largely rural three-county area, people are driving," she said. "They are commuting." Whether people are traveling for work, to head to a Friday night fish fry, or to head to their favorite lake, she said, they were driving on Highway 8 or Highway 51, meaning a large number of people were seeing those billboards throughout the 2021 season.
The grant also helped pay for a sidewalk sign and a pop-up sign Page has used at events and in various locations to draw attention to the program and to raise awareness of TIS and how its spread can be prevented.
Another project about which Page spoke was a survey and control project, also funded by a GLRI grant. It was meant to survey, control, detect and manage terrestrial invasive species. This would could be done on any lands within the Great Lakes Watershed, which includes the northern part of Vilas County and the extreme southeastern part of Oneida County. This funding allowed WHIP to revisit a number of sites on their project list.
WHIP worked with several home owners at both Frontier Lakes and Natural Lakes, and were able to revisit some of those sites in 2021 under this grant. Page said partners worked on European marsh thistle, which is becoming more prevalent, unfortunately, she said. They also worked on sites containing Canada thistle and one spot of yellow arch angel. WHIP was also able to treat one site of yellow parsnip, which Page said residents may start to see more of in the future.
WHIP's purple loosestrife project on the Tenderfoot Lake in northern Vilas County was also funded by GLRI monies in 2021. WHIP had been working in partnership with Vilas County on this project for several years. Biocontrol beetles have been used in this spot to help control this invasive loosestrife plant. The beetles feed on the foliage and stress the plants, which has helped to show declining numbers of purple loosestrife stems. Page said this was the intended effect of the beetles as a control measure. While it would not be in the beetles' best interest to completely wipe out their food source, they do a solid job at keeping the populations under control.
In 2021, WHIP did a good deal of work with Natural Lakes and Frontier Lakes homeowners. These, she said, are some of the biggest homeowners' associations in the state. They became interested in TIS in 2017, spurred on by finding non-native honeysuckle on their properties.
"It has been amazingly impressive, the amount of work they have been able to do," she said. "Multiple work days, again, even during Covid-times, our volunteer, Anne, organized work days in small groups or with two people within a household, so it really wasn't a Covid risk." WHIP has been impressed, she said, with the amount of work the groups had been able to accomplish in the last few years.
WHIP has also received Weed Management Area (WMA) grants, and did so again in 2021. These grants are meant for weed management on non-industrial forest land. The grants come from the Wisconsin DNR. Page said WHIP has been "super grateful" for these grants and operated under two such grants in 2021. One of those grants allowed for work with the Town of Newbold, just north of Rhinelander. The Town completed a roadside invasive survey in 2018 with funds from Lumberjack. The town wanted to keep going with TIS work and last year the first boot brush and interpretive signage was placed at the trailhead near the disc golf course. A Newbold-specific brochure was also created to let landowners know what invasive species had been found and what might be done on their private lands to control or eradicate those invasive species.
Another use for the WMA grant was some of the work at Frontier Lakes. With the work the group has put forward thus far, Page said, they have been able to reduce their dense honeysuckle stands from 22 to only six. The infestation of non-native honeysuckle in that area is estimated to be only 30% of what it was when the group started their control and eradication efforts.
Page also spoke about some work in Lincoln County. The project at Lincoln County Sports Club, Page said, came up because the president Bill Bialecki was involved in the Lumberjack group. Bialecki asked Page to come to a sports club meeting and give a presentation about what invasive species members might see on the landscape and what they might do about anything they find. She then attended their fall clean up day, where she found honey suckle, buckthorn, which was found around the parking lot and club house. She also found a good deal of tansy was starting to move into various places along the trails. She was then able to create a report for the club, summarizing what was present on the landscape. This project was supported by a grant from the dummer grant program from the Ruffed Grouse Society.
For more information on WHIP and the projects they are working on, or to learn how WHIP helps private land owners fight their issues, see their website at https://whipinvasives.org
Beckie Gaskill may be reached via email at [email protected].
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