(water gushing) - [Narrator] The natural world is complicated.

The water, the weather, plants, animals all influenced by countless variables over millions of years that help guide their behavior.

What we do know is for the most part, living things are a product of their environment.

They've evolved over time with the species around them.

They know the rules, they know the players and they found ways to coexist.

When an invasive species comes into play, things change.

- When we think about introduced species that arrive somewhere, we often worried about that they break the rules of the game.

The checks and balances that you have is being broken by species that arrive without their suite of natural predators or diseases.

So then they can outcompete a lot of the native species, become super abundant and create ecological or economic problems.

- The big problem with invasive species, particularly invasive plants, their definition, by definition they are non-native plants, so they're coming from someplace else, which means any of the insects here have never seen them before that they don't have the adaptations to be able to get around their particular chemical defenses.

And the other part of the definition of an invasive plant is that it's aggressively displacing native plants.

So you have a plant, and around here it's typically from Asia, from China that is aggressively pushing out the plants that are now supporting the wildlife around us.

They look like plants, they look like they're contributing to the local ecosystem, but almost nothing can eat them.

- So there's lots of different ways that invasive species can end up here, you know.

Of course, there's a lot of unintentional hitchhikers that maybe, you know, come over on a cargo ship or come over on the wooden pallets that are holding a lot of our goods.

But there's also a lot of intentional introductions, you know, we might order these in over with the internet.

You might want like a new tropical fish or some interesting aquatic plants for your aquarium, for example, but what happens when you can no longer take care of it or you need to move?

In many cases, a lot of times, these get dumped into a local water body.

Now you've introduced a new fish species or a new plant species that can easily take over because that lake or that water body is not adapted to that new species.

(soft humming) (upbeat music) - [Narrator] Invasive species are not new, and some are quite famous.

There's the cane toads that took over Australia, the snake that ate all the birds in Guam.

There's the war on carp, the fish that walks.

- [Newscaster] It's got razor-like teeth, a monstrous appetite, it even walks on land.

- [Narrator] The plant that burns.

- [Newscaster] A plant called giant hogweed, an invasive species that contains skin burning sap.

- [Narrator] It was hard to imagine you could have a scarier name than killer bees until murder hornets.

But most invasive species aren't obvious, they look like they belong.

Plant you've seen by the road or another bug in your house, but look deeper and you'll start to see why they are a big problem and they have to be stopped.

(clicking fingers rhythmically) - Not all introduced species become invasive, the vast majority of them will just stay benign because very often we have a form of biological control that's not human intended, but it exists just out there.

There are predators, generalists that will take out the certain species.

Not all insects that are introduced are problematic, not all plants.

The vast majority of them that are introduced are not problematic.

It's a few that escape those limitations that we have.

- [Narrator] These limitations are the key.

Invasives that lack biological controls can take advantage of a new environment, an environment where they essentially have free reign.

So what happens when these natural controls are taken out of the equation?

To answer that, it might help to ask a local.

(light drumming music) - So you can think even about a native species, and a good example may be deer.

They were under control by mountain lion, and wolves, and bears when Europeans arrived.

And one of the things that they did to protect their livestocks, they were taking out the big predators.

Initially, there were enough hunters out there to shoot for subsistence, but now that has declined and deer have responded in the way that they always have having fawns and they grow in their populations, and now the biological controls, the organisms that were eating them before are no longer there, but it's not the responsibility of the deer, deer just do what deer do.

It's our responsibilities because we took the biological controls away.

- It's all about maintaining balance among what we call trophic levels; you have plants, you have the things that eat plants, then you have the things that eat those plant eaters, so plants, herbivores, predators.

In the case of the deer, the deer's and herbivore, it eats plants, but we've taken away its predators, so it explodes, nothing to control it other than cars and that's not a good control measure.

Don't have as many people hunting as we did anymore, so people get mad at the deer, but it's not that deer's fault.

It's, again, it's our heavy hand of humans that are fooling around with the natural balance between trophic levels that has always kept things chugging along in a balanced way.

- [Narrator] Deer are not an invasive species, but they do show how easily certain species can take over when this natural balance is disrupted.

If a native species like deer can dominate when a few of their biological controls are taken away, what can happen when an invasive arrives with none of them?

(boat engine whirring) As with most things in life, location matters.

Releases from the exotic pet trade in the 1980s led to the massive Burmese python population in the Florida Everglades.

They landed in the perfect wetland habitat with a deep menu of prey that was totally unprepared to defend themselves.

If they were released in a colder northern climate, it's safe to say they would not be thriving.

That's why, when talking about invasive species, it's best to do it at a micro level.

Take New York, for example, home to the largest shipping port on the East Coast and one of the most visited cities in the world, the state is a hotbed for invasive species, and they've made it a point to fight back.

- Here in New York, we're lucky to have a lot of amazing ecosystems.

We have the marine ecosystems on Long Island, we have the Great Lakes, we have the High Peaks of Mount Adirondacks.

And so there's lots of different habitats for different species to be able to find their niche and become established.

So there's a lot to protect, but also a lot that makes us vulnerable.

So in response to having all these unique regions and unique approaches to invasive species, New York State decided to intentionally divide the state up into these eight partnerships for regional invasive species management, something that we call the PRISMs, and so that those regions could deal with the invasive species that are unique to those regions.

And it's worked really well, you know, it's kind of gotten these invasive species issues into the hands of those people who really know the landscape well.

(waterfall gushing) - [Narrator] This comprehensive approach to invasive species forms the bedrock for New York strategy.

Partnering these local PRISMs with other nonprofits and universities ensures that every region is accounted for and no stone is left unturned.

- We talk a lot about the ecological impacts, the negative impacts for biodiversity that invasive species has.

And I think people often think, that's the nature lovers' problem, or that's the scientists problem, but actually invasive species do impact our daily lives.

(traffic bustling) (car horn honking) - [Narrator] For a state known for its city, New York has a lot of trees.

Over 60% of the state is forest, a whopping 18.9 million acres.

Forests provide oxygen, habitat and protect our water.

On top of all that, New York trees are responsible for tens of billions towards the economy, which is an issue when something out there won't stop killing them.

(daunting music) (chainsaw whirring) - [Newscaster] The groan of chain saws echoes along the Southern State Parkway as hundreds of trees are being chopped down and thousands will soon follow.

The culprit?

Asian longhorned beetles that leave trees riddled with holes, killing them from the inside out.

- [Man] When it comes to bugs, you know, (chuckles) they're good at what they do.

- There's a bug in Niagara County still hanging around and it's leaving behind a trail of devastation.

- [Newscaster] The landscape here is slowly being wiped out.

- [Ashley] The emerald ash borer.

- The emerald ash borer.

(chainsaw whirring) (tree branch crushing on the ground) - [Newscaster] The tiny bug is eating its way through trees and destroying landscapes.

- Devastation.

I mean, it's truly terrible.

Western New York has changed.

- Trees are falling.

We've had five trees total fall.

- [Newscaster] Fall, because the emerald ash borer beetle has now invaded any of the ash trees in Amherst.

- Ash become dangerous as they die, they tend to break apart in large chunks, which could hurt somebody.

And so we want people to be aware that this problem is out there.

- [Newscaster] But the beetle could also end up killing the town budget because of the cost to remove the dead wood.

- But we're probably talking into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

- So I think most people think of anything that would eat a tree would be a pest.

And, you know, I guess to a certain extent you could consider that, but then if you look at native insects that eat trees, they actually perform a very valuable service to the tree population by taking out the weakened individuals from the reproductive pool, there's no regulation of the invasive populations, they leave their predators behind where they came from.

And so those invasive insects then are capable of taking out whole species of trees or whole genera of trees.

(light dramatic music) It's just something that 40 years ago, when I got into the business, I never thought was possible.

Ash trees are actually, I think, are underappreciated tree in New York State.

It's, perhaps, we think about maybe 1/10 of the hardwood forest is ash.

When you have forest pests like the emerald ash borer, what they do is they get into under the bark of the tree and they kill the tree by eating the bark, eating the inner bark of the tree.

But in the meantime, what they do is they rest over the wintertime in that bark.

And so if you see your tree, it's dead and you cut it down and you want use it for firewood.

If you transport that firewood someplace, however many miles away and you leave it, the bugs will then emerge in the spring and they'll be there, and they're gonna look for more new trees to attack.

And, indeed, many of the instances that I think we've found new infestations of emerald ash borer in New York State, we feel were caused by people bringing firewood into their campgrounds.

Ash is actually far more prominent in areas where humans are present.

They hide around our infrastructure, so the big impact of emerald ash borer is that it kills trees that are right near our homes, our power lines, our roads, and the issues are huge, it's not just a tree dying in the woods, it impacts humans tremendously.

And that's why I think we really need to look very carefully at not only emerald ash borer, which is running wild now through the state, but what's the next one coming in?

And, you know, we have to think more carefully that it might actually be wise to spend a little bit of time in prevention, time and money rather than incur the incredible expense of dealing with the impacts later.

(light pondering music) - We bought this site in 2007 and opened a winery here in 2010.

Best grape for this area is probably Cabernet Franc and Chardonnay.

But a lot of other things do fairly well or very well most years.

One of those things, you never knew how popular you were until you own a vineyard.

(birds chirping) First thing you notice, there's no lanternflies here.

An there's one right there, so we got one, but he's not gonna be living too long.

(birds chirping) Every plant a few on 'em, some have more than a few like this guy right here, probably at the point where they stay on here for a couple weeks and this plant's probably gonna be dead.

So we can see that that's a spotted lanternfly.

(daunting music) - [Newscaster] Spotted lanternfly is showing just how destructive it can be.

- They just keep moving in and moving in, and it looks like swarms of locusts, that's how heavy they come in here.

- [Newscaster] Since several dead lantern flies and one live one were found at a tree nursery in Deer Park.

They say the bug arrived at a shipment from Pennsylvania where the fly is most prevalent.

- [Narrator] The spotted lanternfly feeds on the sugary sap of over 70 different plant species, including grape vines.

- [Richard] You know, they're just not a very nice bug.

- Yeah, New York State has been re really watching the spotted lanternfly closely as it's been moving in from more southern states.

This is something that was introduced just a few years ago to North America.

And here in New York State, we have a lot of commodities at stake.

So agriculture is a big example.

We have, you know, lots of wineries, they can go after grape vines, after tree fruits.

And so those areas can be deeply impacted, it can, you know, destroy the crop for that season for that farmer, and so that's a big economic impact.

- There's a couple vineyards south of here that lost most or all their grapevine.

Some people quit, you know, other people decided to buy fruit from somewhere else and not replanting until they know what, you know, how to take care of it.

It's kinda like, you know, once they leave the genie outta the bottle, it's pretty hard to put it back in.

So that mean it's, unless you get it stopped, it's gonna be a problem for everybody.

(melancholy music) (traffic bustling) (drone whirring) - So we're looking for a spotted lanternfly particularly the egg masses, they'll lay their egg masses on just about anything that sits outside for any period of time in a known infested area, they're shiny and gray, so we can pick 'em up pretty easily with the camera.

I'm using a zoom camera so I can fly pretty close and then zoom right in on anything that doesn't look quite right.

This is basically the process, just trying to keep the aircraft steady over the trailer in the breeze, and you can see it moves back and forth a lot.

So if there's anything really suspicious, we could always bring it back and look at it on the computer before we let the truck drive away.

So I was interested in some of these dark spots.

So you can see, I zoomed the camera in just to get a better idea of their shape and color.

They didn't really match for egg masses so we can let the truck go.

(tires crunching on road) - But the issue is, and why we're going through all this trouble is the economic impact and the impact to the state in terms of its tourism.

You look at what's going on in Pennsylvania and the problems that they're having, we don't wanna have that same issue here.

So, you know, prevention is worthwhile, you know, if we can educate these guys about the impacts, the spotted lanternfly, get them under compliance, that goes a long ways in terms of preventing it and also determining where it may be.

One of these truck drivers, you know, maybe at their home later on and they may see a spotted lanternfly So the outreach that we do to them is also, you know, critically important, not just for New York, but for other states, 'cause they're coming in from all over the place.

- [Producer] First time that you heard about any kind of invasive species quarantine and all that?

- This is it.

- [Producer] First time you've heard about it?

- It's the first time ever.

I'm gonna give it to my boss, the pamphlet they gave me and have them keep an eye out for it.

Oh, I like my wine, so let's get this under control.

- [Narrator] Getting invasive species under control is easier said than done, and it gets more difficult the longer they are here.

- Once a invasive species has been here and it becomes established, it's really hard to get rid of.

So when we're thinking about being strategic, we think about things in the terms of this invasive species curve, where at the top end of the curve that's when a species has been here, it's established, it's population numbers are really high and there's really no way to get rid of it completely.

Really what we wanna be doing is so we wanna be focusing on those bottom parts of the curve where, you know, those populations are really low, where we're detecting things early, you know, have that good return on investment, where we find something we're able to stamp it out before it becomes established and becomes a big problem.

- [Narrator] When it comes to detecting invasive species early, sometimes it helps to get creative.

And it never hurts to enlist a little help from a friend.

(birds chirping) (dog thumping in the grass) (dog panting) (dog barking) (light upbeat music) - Today, we are working with Dia, our conservation detection dog and Josh, our handler, looking for Scotch broom.

Scotch broom is a tier two invasive species in the Lower Hudson, which means that it's emerging as an invader, it's not yet widespread.

It's at low enough numbers that we actually have a chance of eradicating it.

And Dia is one component of that effort to eradicate Scotch broom in the lower Hudson.

They're in among other plants, it's harder for the humans to find visually, we use visual cues, and when it's among other plants, it's hard to find it.

But the dogs actually use a scent cue.

We think we'll be able to progress a lot faster with the dog because she'll be finding plants when they're smaller and we won't have to wait another year or two years before humans would be able to see those plants.

- You know, what we see is that the dog is coming into what we call scent cones.

And you could probably see from watching her she'll be searching, and then you'll just kind of see this change in the position of her body, or her head will jerk and go back, and you'll see she, kind of, just has her nose down, she's sniffing around because the scent can get caught in little pockets in the grass or other trees, and then she's going and she can smell it.

But she's trying to find basically the source of it, right.

And so in certain circumstances, there were a couple of plants together, so you see she's going, "Oh, this one, this one, this one, "and this one is the one I'm gonna indicate on, "this where the most scent is coming from."

- 10, 20 years ago, who would've thought that we'd have drones that we might be able to use for this kind of work.

Yes, we knew that dogs could do search work, but who would've thought that we could have gone here?

I don't think we can predict what we're gonna have next, but I think we're always gonna have invasive species, especially with a global world, and if we wanna protect our native habitats, we're gonna have to have tools and mechanisms that allow us to do that.

- [Joshua] All right, got another one here.

- Yay!

- Let's flag that.

By using dogs, we're bringing awareness to this issue because, you know, people really, really love dogs.

And so they say, "Oh, she's doing this, "what's she doing?"

"She's looking for invasives."

"Oh, what are invasives?"

So it's also a good way for us to educate the public about what's going on and why this is an issue.

And if we can attach the face of a dog to the program that helps pique people's interests.

There's nothing more than she loves than just running and smelling stuff.

So I just feel like this is the perfect job for her.

Yeah.

(light lively music) - [Narrator] Unlike Dia, Brent Kinal invasive species prevention team cannot rely on their sense of smell.

So they have to use is a different method.

- We're gonna be surveying for southern pine beetle.

So the southern pine beetle was first detected in this area in September of 2014.

We began aerial surveys in December of 2014 and we conduct these surveys about four times a year.

Then you guys do the on the ground management for that.

So your job today will be photographer.

I'll be sketching polygons of new infestations if we see any.

And I'll just let you know what side of the plane to be taking pictures out of as we, as we fly.

We'll probably fly for about two hours.

So one of the telltale signs we're looking for, for a southern pine beetle infestation is the red tops of trees in the pine barrens.

That's what we're looking for today.

- So basically I'm just taking pictures of the landscape and eventually if there's anything, any like red topped trees, and later on, I'll go down and survey the area by ground so that I could identify how many exactly, how many trees there are and how much we have to cut.

And then I have a tablet with aerial photographs on it.

And I also have polygons of previous recordings from our aerial surveys, so I can see if there's any new infestations of the southern pine beetle out there.

- [Narrator] Preventing and detecting invasives early is ideal, but it's not always possible.

For aquatic invasive species, natural currents make their job easy.

But when they have to move by land, they need to hitch a ride.

The main way aquatic invasives are spread is by boaters traveling from one water source to another without inspecting or cleaning their boats.

(birds chirping) (tires crunching on road) (car engine humming) But what if the water is already connected?

- [Bernd] Yeah, New York's played a special role in the introduction of water chestnut to North America, 'cause it was introduced close to Schenectady, and it was the first time that it was released.

And now it has spread through major parts of the northeast and it's in the Great Lakes now.

The big problem that we have with water chestnut is that it covers the surfaces and becomes an issue for boating, angling, all kinds of recreation.

And of course there are other ecological effects that go with the plant species that covers the water surface.

- Invasive species is one of those huge environmental problems that people feel overwhelmed by.

They just wanna throw up their hands and say, "We can't get rid of these species, they're here, "they're here to stay.

"We keep getting more and more, "there's nothing we can do about it."

Obviously we're never gonna get rid of all invasive species, but there's a lot of opportunities through knowledge, through innovation, through new technology and also through really looking at our policies and our actions and how they can prevent or not prevent new species introductions.

There's a lot we can do.

And so I think we need to focus on what we can do and not what we can't do.

- So what we do is a situation where a plant has escaped its biological controls by being introduced in an area where those insects or diseases do not exist.

We then go to the native range, study which ones are really specific to this particular plant, and then try to introduce them in safe ways to then allow the ecosystem to form this biological control concept again.

So we are trying to recreate a success that we had with biocontrol for purple loosestrife when we study water chestnut and phragmites insects.

Last year was 25 years that we introduced four different insects to control purple loosestrife.

And we introduced insects that attack the roots, the leaves and the flowers.

Purple loosestrife have used to be one of the most abundant wetland plants in New York.

You could drive along the roadside or on the throughway and purple loosestrife used to be everywhere in big abundances.

Now the plant starts flowering about two months later and the populations have been reduced to much less of what it was.

(people chattering) (traffic bustling) (car horn honking) - [Narrator] Introducing more species on purpose may sound a little strange.

The biological control efforts like these can be extremely effective and safe.

Bernd and the teams spend years testing in the lab before any introductions can begin.

In the meantime established invasives like water chestnut will continue to spread, and they need to be held in check.

(water gurgling) Until other control methods are proven, pulling the plants each year is one way to help give the native species a fighting chance.

(light mellow music) (people chattering) - What we typically do is we like to get in, get the plants by the roots, 'cause if you're not getting the whole plant mass, you know, you're not doing an effective job.

So you get in, grab the roots, grab the whole plant, any fragments that break off of it.

We like to do that, get in, get the whole thing and then repeat, and go over and over again on the patch to slowly knock it down each time.

(light mellow music) As you can see here, this is 46 bags worth and this was just a cleanup swim after the initial patch pick.

The first day we picked 150 bags.

So right now two days of picking, we have over 200 bags of milfoil, and that's just the first patch, and now we're working on the second one.

I have a camp on Lake Bomoseen in Vermont, and the only effort that's happening in that lake that I know of is the harvesters.

And they go in and they essentially give the milfoil a haircut.

Now I've been at that lake since I was eight years old, and then now there's significant amounts of milfoil everywhere.

Our entire channel, there's huge patches throughout the lake.

And when you don't get a good hold on the milfoil, it chokes out all the other natives.

So all the plants that are needed by the native fish and all the species that are living in the water, they need those native plants.

And the milfoil, it grows rapidly faster than any of the natives, and it would be a shame if that happened to a lake like this.

- [Jennifer] So the invasive species curve as that species is starting to grow in abundance.

So say it's been introduced, it's starting to get established, early on in that establishment if we can catch a new population early then we actually have a chance to eradicate it, to get rid of it from the landscape.

- When we're facing invasive species, we basically have two choices: we can accept the consequences or we can do something about it.

(humming) (light upbeat music) - Over the years, I was able to witness how Japanese knotweed is able to take over an entire river corridor because it happened right in my backyard pretty much.

And when I came up here to start working, I realized that the knotweed infestations that we still have are very small and we have a lot of river miles here to protect.

So these infestations that are just starting on these rivers are really important to address because if we don't, you know, we could lose a lot of these very scenic and economically important river corridors that are here in the park.

Japanese knotweed is a large invasive shrub that grows in very tall and dense stands.

- Yeah.

So if you have knotweed in your backyard, that's something that you really wanna keep an eye on.

It can, of course, you know, take over quite a bit of your lawn, but as it starts getting close to your, the house structure, knotweed can actually grow into the foundation, it can cause a lot of problems to buildings.

And actually in England, there's, you're not able to get a mortgage for your house unless you've actually addressed the Japanese knotweed that's growing there in your yard.

- Many people had looked at this property before I had, and everyone decided not to buy it, and a part of that was because of the Japanese knotweed.

I would say there was about three quarters to one acre of knotweed, just standing right behind me all the way up to the driveway and the stream.

Part of it was maybe 10 feet high in sections, and it was dense.

It was very dense.

You could walk through it, it was like Jurassic Park, I would say (laughs), back there.

One of my concerns, given the proximity of the Japanese knotweed to the house, is that it can grow into the cracks and crevices of the foundation and start to break up the actual structural integrity of the house.

And I didn't want to allow that to happen to my property.

- So the main way we treat or manage Japanese knotweed when it's too large to dig up is through a process called stem injection.

So the way the stem injection process works is we use a stem injection gun with a short hardened needle, and we inject a select amount on herbicide down near the base of each one of the canes.

We also have these marking pens on our stem injection gun that mark each one of the canes as we're injecting them so that we can keep track of where we've been and we don't overtreat the site.

(daunting music) (light pondering music) - Okay, the hemlock woolly adelgid is actually this teeny tiny little aphid-like thing, and they're only females in North America, there's no males.

And that's the really dangerous aspect of their biology, 'cause all as one individual to settle on a tree and you've got a whole new population developing.

So the hemlock woolly adelgid, this little tiny thing probably came over to North America on nursery stock in the early 1900s.

And it got going in the Richmond, Virginia area, got into the Appalachian Mountains and spread from the Appalachians north into New York State.

- [Spencer] We did not anticipate finding this adelgid here, and yeah, developed a plan over the course of a couple months, and here we are.

- 2017, we found hemlock woolly adelgid at the Plotter Kill, which was in Schenectady County.

And then that same year we found it at Prospect Mountain in the Adirondack Park.

And since then, Anchor Diamond is one of the only places that we've found it in between.

So we've yet to have any more detections in the Adirondacks.

And so as Spencer said before, this is the most northern point at which we found it since the Prospect Mountain find.

So we're in like early detection, rapid response mode.

You know, hemlock woolly adelgid isn't as well established up at this northern front yet.

So we're trying to knock back populations with pesticides to try to prevent it from becoming more established.

Hemlock woolly adelgid is an invasive insect from Asia and it attaches itself to the base of hemlock needles and basically sucks the juice out of the plant.

(light thoughtful music) - [Spencer] When hemlocks die off, it's an ecosystem-altering process, it affects every facet of that ecosystem.

- Hemlocks are often found along streams, steep slopes or, you know, shady slopes along streams and it uptakes all the water coming from agricultural systems.

So it sucks up polluted water and prevents it from reaching the streams or the rivers.

- This is something that I've been thinking about.

I love to fish and we have these native brook trout that are amazing.

And the hemlocks, I think, are incredibly important at maintaining the low temperatures, which the brook trout require for their reproduction.

- It's been well established in North America for quite some time and in the southern states and like the Appalachian mountains, it's had quite an impact.

(daunting music) The chemical treatments, sort of, act as like a short term strategy while we wait for longer term strategies to take effect.

So we have a partnership with Cornell University and the DEC has funded a biocontrol lab at Cornell, whose objective is to rear the predators of hemlock woolly adelgid.

And the idea is we wanna treat as much as we can until the biocontrol is a more feasible option.

Are you like ready, set, go.

- [Spencer] Yeah, let's you know, go and then.

- [Narrator] Managing invasives is an expensive task with all the resources and money invested in the fighting back, it comes as no surprise that some question whether or not this is all worthwhile?

- A number of people that have challenged the notion that we have to get rid of our invasive species or at least fight them, have several points.

One is that, they will say there have been no extinctions caused by invasive plants on continents.

There have been extinctions on islands, I guess that doesn't count, but on continents, no extinctions, and therefore they're not bad.

I have a problem with that because since when is extinction the only measure of a problem?

That's like only going to a doctor when you're dead.

- Very often, I just hear, "Oh, let nature or take its course."

That's not happening after we mucked it up.

So for deer, for example, say, let nature take its course, but taking out the predators; there's no wolves, no mountain lion, whatever the factors that control deer at the some point and then say, "Let the changed nature, that we changed, take course, that's not a responsible way to interacting with our environment.

We created the change, so we are responsible for that.

- It has been argued that that when you add an invasive species to North America, for example, you're increasing species diversity.

And on a continental scale, that is true, we now have 3,300 more plant species existing in North America than we used to have because of invasive plants.

But diversity and ecosystems function at the local level, not at the continental scale.

So you have to look at ecosystem function in the appropriate scale.

A lot of people wonder how long it takes a plant from someplace else that has been here to actually become a native plant?

That's a good question.

That's a good question.

The answer is it takes an awful long time.

A plant becomes a native when it acts like the natives that have been here, essentially forever, And we can look what a plant's evolutionary potential is when it's interacting with other organisms, by seeing it does where it came from.

So let's talk about the common reed, phragmites.

It was used as packing material in the earliest ships from Europe, the invasive genotype we have is from Europe.

So the ships docked and they threw all the phragmites out on shore.

So there are some populations of phragmites in the East that have been here 400 years.

You would think that's long enough to start acting like a native.

Well, if we go to Europe and we measure the number of insects that are eating phragmites in Europe, it's 170 species.

So that plant is contributing to local ecosystems, it's maintaining biodiversity, all seems to be in balance.

When we look at how many insects have adapted, to phragmites here after 400 years, it's five species.

So adaptation is happening, but it's very slow.

How long will it take phragmites to act like the natives that it's displaced?

I don't know, we can only guess, but you're talking about thousands of years, probably hundreds of thousands of years.

And in the meantime, the relationships that used to be here have disappeared where phragmites is.

- So when I first started working for the Heritage Program, I went on one of the trips to help our state botanists look for some of the rare plants that had been growing and had been documented in the salt marsh-tidal creek system in the Peconic River area on Long Island.

And so I was really excited to be able to see these rare plants that had been assessed many years ago.

But once we got there we realized that this site had been completely overgrown by phragmites.

And it was, you know, very heartbreaking to see because we knew that those rare plants that we were there to look for really didn't have a chance within this big dense patch of the invasive species.

- It's also been said that that another word for invasion is change.

True enough, ecosystems change a lot.

The question is, do they change for the better or for the worse?

When an invasive species comes in it doesn't only knock out one plant, it typically knocks them all out.

If you look at a kudzu invasion, it's this blanket of kudzu and all the plants that used to live there are now gone.

Same thing with phragmites, same thing with porcelain berry and autumn olive, they just blanket the area that they invade.

So you're not losing one plant species, you're losing pretty much everything that used to live there.

Nature is primarily made up of creatures, plants and animals that have been interacting with each other for eons.

And they have found the best way to interact is to develop specialized relationships with the plants and animals around them.

So most of the creatures out there are specialists.

What I think is the most important type of specialization is the relationship between the insects that eat plants and the plants themselves.

So we can use the monarch butterfly as an example, it is a specialist on milkweeds, and it's had to specialize in milkweeds because milkweeds protect themselves.

They've got cardiac glycosides and milky latex sap.

Those are good repellents to other insects, but over the eons the monarch has developed the physiological ability to store and excrete and detoxify cardiac glycosides, and they have behavioral adaptations that allow them to avoid contacting this sticky latex sap, so now they can eat milkweeds.

But in developing all those specialized adaptations to milkweeds, they have not spent any time developing adaptations to eat the tannins that are in oak trees or the cucurbitacins in cucurbits, or the nicotine in tobacco and on and on.

The monarch butteries has actually done us a huge favor in the last 10 years or so by pretty much disappearing.

Because what it's done is point out how important these specialized relationships are.

When we take milkweeds out of our landscapes, we lose the monarch.

So if you want a world with no butterflies, let's keep doing what we're doing.

But if you want a world with butterflies, we've gotta have the native plants that support them, our invasive species are not going to do it.

- Invasive species are here because of us.

We're the one that brought this problem.

We're the one that have carried them either on purpose or by accident from one country to another, and introduced them into a new place where they were able to flourish and take over and cause us all kinds of economic, environmental, and health problems.

But we're also part of the solution.

We understand how they're getting here and we need to take real action to prevent more from coming in.

I know it seems like we have a lot now, but there's a lot more species that could be introduced if we don't act now and stop them from coming in.

- You know, one of the issues we have is that we humans have stopped thinking of ourselves as part of the natural world, we're something separate.

And we've fallen into the trap of thinking we don't need the natural world.

Well, in fact, we are very much a part of the natural world, we're a product of it, and we need it every single day.

You may live in a city, but your clean water, your air, your food, your moderate weather systems, all of these things are produced by functioning ecosystems that all do better when they have a lot of species in them, and they all do more poorly when we take those species away.

And that's what invasive plants are doing, they're reducing the number of species in our local ecosystems.

Again, in so many cases it's not necessary, we don't have to buy a plant from Asia that's going to become invasive and reduce our ecosystem productivity.

The costs are enormous and the benefits are comparatively few.

- As of right now it's all short term, just kill the bugs as they land on your plant.

My feeling is I'm gonna replant, and I think I can control the situation, and then I'll be ahead of everybody else when they got the answer to the problem.

If they get the answer to the problem.

- So I grew up in the Midwest in Ohio, and that's one of the early states that had the emerald ash borer which first popped up in Michigan.

And so my parents still live at our, the same home that I grew up in, and we always had amazing trees all through the backyard.

But over the last few years, my dad has been one by one having to cut down and remove all of our ash trees because the emerald ash borer has been killing those off.

- So for me, I just, I have a really hard time imagining what New York would be like without the hemlock trees.

I think with forest insects pest in general, it's like, you don't know what you got till it's gone.

And if you just go out in the woods and you don't really notice the hemlocks, I think now you need to, sort of, like, think about that, look over your shoulder and think, "Oh, this is a hemlock tree.

"What would it be like if it was gone?"

I think that it would be astounding to most people.

And I do that all the time.

- [Narrator] The ripple effects of invasives are far reaching, and for a lot of people they're personal.

- I don't live at the Ponderosa, but like I said, I used to have a back lawn back here.

When I first bought this property, it was bad.

There was, no, we chopped down the trees and like that so I could make a lawn, and I kept it down for the longest time.

This year, I said, "No more.

"I'm gonna see how bad it gets."

And it got bad.

- All of the life that we know about in the universe and probably all the complex life that is out there occurs in a thin little film called the biosphere on the surface of the Earth.

And we've chopped up that biosphere and said, you know, "Tom owns this, Dick owns this, "Harry owns this, and Mary owns this."

Okay, that's done.

But along with that ownership comes the responsibility of maintaining all of the life in the universe.

It's an awesome responsibility.

We've had a heavy hand in all of our ecosystems, so now we have to manage them so that they stay in balance so that they remain productive.

I think we can do that.

80, 86% of the U.S. is privately owned east of the Mississippi.

So you don't have to think about invasive species problems everywhere, just think about the invasive problems on your property.

If everybody controlled them on their own property, we'd be 86% done.

That's a much more manageable goal, and I think everybody does have the responsibility of addressing that.

- As individuals and as humans, we tend to dominate ecosystems.

We care for them.

We bring species around.

We enjoy them.

That gives us incredible power, but I think it comes from "Star Wars", "With great power comes great responsibility."

And that's what I take at heart, that it's our responsibility to, the things that we did wrong, the things that we got wrong, whether they were intentionally or not that we have it in our power to change some of the bad outcomes that we generate, that's our responsibility.

(light dramatic music) Does it come from "Star Wars"?

Do you guys know?

- [Crew] "Spider-Man" - "Spider-Man" (laughs).

Okay.

- [Narrator] Here's what you can do to help stop the spread of invasive species.

After using your watercraft, make sure you clean, drain and dry.

When hiking or camping, remember to clean your equipment of dirt or any plant material.

If you are using camp firewood, remember to buy it where you burn it and don't transport firewood.

To learn more or report an invasive species, visit imapinvasives.org.

For additional information, please visit the DEC website or NYIS.info.

- A great way that people can help is to get involved.

We have these partnerships for regional invasive species management, find out which PRISM you live in here in the state and, you know, go to their partner meetings, sign up for their email Listserve and go to these volunteer days that they have.

They have amazing people that are coming out to do control projects.

They are going out and doing mapping projects.

They're training people to be early detectors so that they can catch those invasive species when they're early on.

- Aquatic invasive species are, for the most part, spread from lake to lake via the overland transport of boats and their trailers.

To stop the spread of aquatic invasive species there are some simple steps that people can take, and that is to make sure that their boat is clean, drain and dry before entering a new water body.

To clean your boat you first look around the outside for any attached animals or plants running your hand along the outside of the boat, feeling for any bumps which may be aquatic invasive animals.

It's important to check the wheel well, the axle and the wires attached to it running underneath the boat, as well as the brake lights and any other place where aquatic plants may catch as you pull the boat out of the water.

So once you've collected all the aquatic plant material off the boat, you can dispose of them in the aquatic invasive species disposal station, or in a garbage receptacle.

The next step is to drain any standing water in your boat.

First, pull your bilge plug to drain any water in your bilge.

Next, lower your motor to allow the water to drain.

Livewells should also be drained.

Be sure to check your anchor for any attached mud or plants and clean that as well.

The next step is to dry your boat.

Make sure to allow it to sit out in the sun for at least five days.

For smaller watercraft, another option is to towel dry.

- [Narrator] Thank you for helping to stop the spread.

(light outro music)