Utilizing partnerships & information technology to advance invasive species, forestry & agriculture education

The project includes 219 invasive plant species in the United States. The focus of this DVD-ROM is to provide identification, ecology, and control information for invasive plants in the United States occurring in aquatic, wetland, forest, rangeland, desert, or prairie habitats. This product compiles information in recent publications from leaders in invasive species management in the United States, such as the USDA Forest Service, USDA APHIS PPQ, The Nature Conservancy, The Plant Conservation Alliance, The Southeast Exotic Pest Plant Council, and the Invasive Plant Atlas of New England.

The SPDN Invasive Arthropod Workshop provides Land Grant University, USDA-APHIS-PPQ, USDA-Forest Service, and State Departments of Agriculture the opportunity to discuss communication protocols and invasive arthropod issues relevant to the southern U.S. This workshop also allows participants to have intensive, hands-on identification training for several pest taxa of concern. This CD-ROM includes the presentations from the workshop and additional images of species covered.

The hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA) is a serious pest of hemlock trees in Georgia. It is an aphid like insect that feeds on eastern and Carolina hemlock trees. The result of this feeding is eventual tree mortality. The very existence of the eastern and Carolina hemlock species is greatly threatened by HWA. This CD-ROM includes presentations, publications, control information and images of hemlock woolly adelgid.

In late summer of 2003, the Bugwood Network was approached by FHTET to provide copies of the Biological Control of Invasive Plants in the Eastern United States publication on CD-ROM for the conference Invasive Plants in Natural and Managed Systems: Linking Science and Management and 7th International Conference on the Ecology and Management of Alien Plant Invasions, held in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, on November 3 to 7, 2003. In response, the Bugwood Network proposed to FHTET the production of a comprehensive CD-ROM similar to the Bark Beetles of North America CD-ROM, focusing (in this case) on invasive plants of the eastern United States. The Bugwood Network included USDA APHIS Plant Protection and Quarantine (PPQ) as a partner to help add Federal Noxious Weed information to the CD-ROM. Complete text and images of four publications from the USDA Forest Service, National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Southeast Exotic Pest Plant Council were included on the disk. The CD-ROM addressed 97 species of interest to the eastern United States, including images and species descriptions, ecology, and control options. All images and publications were added to the Forestry Images and Invasive.org websites. The CD-ROM was provided to each of the attendees of the conference and included in the Southeast and Florida Exotic Pest Plant Councils magazine, Wildland Weeds (Spring 2004 Vol. 7 No. 2). To date, over 200,000 copies of the CD-ROM have been produced and distributed.

This training manual is presented in an enhanced, interactive electronic version on a CD-ROM inserted in a sleeve in the back inside cover of the printed publication. This material is intended to provide the information necessary for you to meet the standards of the Environmental Protection Agency for pesticide certification in the Forest Pest Control category and to prepare you to take your state certification examination, based on this manual. This manual is not designed to provide you with all of the information needed for forest pest control.

The Bark Beetles of North America CD-ROM provides users with information and images related to the most important bark beetles affecting trees in North America. The CD-ROM was the first product from the Bugwood Network to combine images and information in an easy to use HTML interface, and provides 192 high resolution images covering 28 species.

Forest Pests of North America Integrated Pest Management Photo CD Series contains three hundred (300) images in Kodak Digital Sciences Photo CD Image Pac format (PCD) that can be used to support and assist the implementation of forest IPM in the North America. The high-resolution, full-color Photo CD Image Pac format captures all of the image data contained on 35mm film. A one-user license copy of the Kodak Access 3.1 software for viewing and manipulation of Photo CD images is on CD Vol. 1. The 300 images in this set are divided equally between images related to forest pathology and forest entomology, and are North American in scope. The photographs were taken by many different photographers and were obtained from several image collections as part of a larger project being undertaken by the authors. We attempted to locate and include images of the more important US forest pathogens and insects.