We are in the early stages of forming this CWMA and ask for your help in understanding the needs and priorities of the community. Please complete the following survey to help us understand more about your familiarity of CWMA’s and the needs and threats your organization faces when it comes to controlling invasive plants. Click here for the CWMA Survey.
Background Information
A Cooperative Weed Management Area (CWMA) is a local partnership that coordinates efforts to address the threat of invasive plants across jurisdictional boundaries. Although multiple CWMA’s exist in Washington and Oregon, none are focused specifically on prairie-oak habitat. The goal of the Cascadia Prairie Oak Weed Management Area is to provide a coordinated effort to prevent and control invasives throughout prairie oak habitat of the Willamette Valley-Puget Trough-Georgia Basin ecoregion. Although groups are already working together within their locales, this would increase collaboration throughout the range from Eugene to Vancouver Island and everything in between.
Why Now?
Stated Interest There is expressed interest in an eco-region wide effort to combat invasives and there are existing established cooperative relationships between many of the individuals and organizations that would be desired partners in a prairie-oak CWMA.
Expressed Need There are extensive control efforts underway throughout the ecoregion, establishing a CWMA would not only improve control efforts but would allow for coordinated education, prevention, early detection and monitoring.
Economic Sense A prairie-oak CWMA would formalize existing efforts to combat invasives in prairie-oak habitat and by doing so would lead to more effective actions and better outcomes, ensuring that the best techniques are being employed in a coordinated fashion, maximizing resources.