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Kawainui Marsh Outreach Project
Project Overview: The Kawainui Marsh Outreach Project is a partnership between the Hawaii Wildlife Ecology Lab (HWEL) at the University of Hawaii, Manoa and Hawaiian Mission Academy, Windward (HMAW). The project was organized and is lead by one of HWEL's graduate students, Kristen Harmon. The project aims to educate youth about the importance of wetlands and provide them with hands on wetland restoration experience. Participants in the program gain experience in outplanting of native Hawaiian wetland plants, removal of nonnative/invasive plants, and implementing a scientific experiment.
Experiment: For the 2018 & 2019 Spring Semesters, 7th and 8th grade students at HMAW tested the impacts of carbon amendments to soil on competitive interactions between native Hawaiian sedges and invasive wetland plant species. The experiment consisted of 12, 2x2m plots each containing 4 native Hawiaian plant species. 3 plots were used as controls, and 9 of the plots received some combination of the 2 experimental treatments, sugar and hand weeding. Students visited the experimental site every other week to take measurements and apply treatments.
Results from 2018: The addition of sugar to soil may be beneficial for suppressing invasive plant growth; however, the amount of sugar and the frequency of sugar treatments may be very important, as too much sugar applied too frequently suppressed native plant growth. Hand-weeding of invasive plants was the most beneficial treatment to native plant growth but was not effective at decreasing the number of invasive plants. In fact, the number of invasive plants increased between each visit in plots that received only hand-weeding. This could be because removing invasive plants opens a niche space that can be quickly occupied by more invasive plants. Alternatively, our hand-weeding treatment may not have been frequent enough, as our study period took place during the “rainy” season on O‘ahu, and invasive plants may have grown too quickly for removal to make an impact. Our results suggest that adding sugar to soil is a potential alternative to hand-weeding, but more data is needed to determine the amount of sugar, as well as the frequency of treatments, that will most benefit native plant growth. The results of this project may help wetland managers control invasive wetland plant growth.