Blog & News

This week’s post is from Linda Thomas, Resource Management Officer, PEI National Parks and PEI Invasvie Species Council member.

Welcome to the fall season, we have had a busy summer with invasive species in PEI National Park and have started to look at our results. More details later. In PEI National Park success is measured by indexing two components, the area occupied and the number of pre-established forest grids infected for our five targeted invasive species.

One of the five targeted species in the park is Scotch pine. For many reasons the effort to reduce this species in the park has been limited, however we expect to remove a significant number in the next year reducing our area impacted by invasive species.

Scotch pine grows aggressively during the first few years, its roots crowd out roots of the other species leaving only Scotch pine. Another concern for Scotch pine is its hosting ability for a large range of insects and diseases making it a source for the transfer of some pests to valued native tree species. There is an area in Cavendish where the Scotch pine (likely a homestead remnant) has been very successful and spread to a grove of hundreds. When the Scotch pine is removed the area will be restored with Acadian tree species.

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