Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
The Nursery and Garden Industry Australia (NGIA) as well as many state
nursery and garden assocations (in Australia) have proactively formed working
alliances with state governments on restricting the distribution and sale of inva-
sive species (EPPO Reporting Service - Invasive Plants 2007/061). The main
foci of the NGIA's “Invasive Policy Position” (Nursery and Garden Industry -
Invasive Plants Policy Position, http://www.ngia.com.au/docs/pdf/your_associ-
ations/NGIA_invasiveweedspolicy.pdf. Accessed 9 June 2008) are (1) that
government takes a fair approach to ascribing blame for invasive plants to nurs-
ery and garden groups, (2) the development of mutually agreed upon national
and state prohibited plant species lists, (3) reliable and independent methods for
assessing invasiveness, (4) government recognition of the industry's invasive
plant regulation efforts, (5) government approval and support of industry-based
communciation and awareness programs that target industry and consumer
groups, and (6) government support for a secure and sustainable nursery and
garden industries.
An example of nursery industry and government collaboration is the Australian
“Grow Me Instead” Program (Nursery & Garden Industry - Grow Me Instead!
http://www.ngia.com.au/home_gardeners/growme_instead.asp. Accessed 9 June
2008). The purposes of this program are to (1) identify garden species that are
invasive, (2) identify suitable native and nonnative alternative species, and (3)
educate the public via nursery industry programs with the ultimate goal of ceas-
ing the sale of invasive plant species. This best management practices approach
to the invasive plant problem exemplifies an advocative relationship between
government and industry. Such a progressive relationship is apt to reduce the sale
of invasive species and avoids the more typical adversarial relationship between
the nursery and governments because the nursery industry is taking an
active
role
in educating the public and managing the sale of invasive species.
Despite the proactive and proenvironment measures taken by the NGIA
described earlier, there are some areas of cooperation that are not evident. A recent
report, “Poisonous and Invasive Plants in Australia: Enabling Consumers to Buy
Safe Plants” (Thomson 2007), calls for the NGIA to, in part, develop a plant labe-
ling code of practice, which will give consumers concise information on a species'
poisionous and invasive properties. The NGIA issued labeling guidelines in 2007
(Nursery & Garden Industry Australia - National Plant Labelling Guidelines 2007)
but did not issue a code of practice. The lack of such a code makes implementation
of labeling recommendations unlikely.
9.5.3
Biological Measures to Control Invasive NIS
There are some strategies and efforts to induce sterility into popular ornamental inva-
sive NIS (Egolf 1981, 1986, 1988; Li et al. 2004; Olsen and Ranney 2005). As an
example, the triploid
Hibiscus syriacus
L. “Diana” sets very little fruit (Dirr 1998),
which is in contrast to the diploid species that sets a large amount of fruit and
