A story by Bebe Raupe on Theresa Culley. This article is also featured in the October 4, 2024, issue of The Ripple.
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Being an agent of change takes more than expertise. It takes tenacity, the ability to build coalitions, and a willingness to understand opposing viewpoints, says plant ecologist Theresa Culley. For nearly two decades she has brought all these skills into play as part of a statewide effort to control invasive species.
The professor of biological sciences at the University of Cincinnati admits there was a time when she was not particularly alarmed about invasive plants. It simply was not her focus. But then, in 2005, while walking through U.C.’s Harris M. Benedict Nature Preserve—a 65-acre national preserve where some rare plant species have been found—she and fellow botanist, Marjie Becus, spotted a Bradford pear sapling.
“This was decidedly not a native tree,” she says, “It was an invasive one. As a scientist, I wondered why it was there. How was it spreading?”
Perhaps Ohio’s most high-profile invasive, the Asian native was brought to the United States in the early 1900s and began being cultivated mid-century as the perfect “street tree” for its long-lasting autumn color and dazzling spring display of white blooms.
Over the ensuing decades, the tree proliferated, largely by bird dispersal. Gradually offspring of the Bradford pear and other Callery pear cultivars started crowding out native species, triggering negative impacts up the food chain, resulting in a loss of biodiversity, Culley says.
Her questions about that pear sapling led Culley to the Ohio Invasive Plants Council (OIPC), a coalition of organizations and individuals working to protect the state’s natural ecosystems from the effects of invasive plants.
According to the OIPC, some 25,000 non-native plants have been introduced to the United States, causing more than $34 billion a year in damage to the environment, forestry, agriculture, industry, recreation, and human health.
When Culley joined OIPC it was launching an effort to augment the Ohio Department of Natural Resources efforts to curb invasives. OIPC included the first article on the pear’s spread in its conference proceedings in 2007. Afterward, Culley and her OIPC colleagues began compiling an unoffical list of invasives, drawing on the expertise of plant scientists like herself, land managers, and the nursery industry.
In 2009, OIPC began developing an assessment protocol based on a careful review of scientific literature, existing protocols from other states and organizations, and input from members with relevant expertise.
By 2013 the OIPC used this protocol to issue its first list of invasives, updating the state’s catalog by adding 19 more plants. This list, in turn, laid the foundation for Ohio’s 2018 law (Chapter 901:5 of Ohio Administrative Code) that prohibits the sale, distribution, importation, or intentional dissemination of invasive species.
During this multi-year effort, Culley tapped various “soft skills,” negotiating a balance between the economic demands of the nursery industry which sold many invasives, and land managers’ desire for speedy remediation. While they may have agreed conceptually about the threat of invasives, the two sides viewed real-world resolution through decidedly different lenses, she says.
Moving forward required sensitivity to opposing viewpoints, plus many one-on-one meetings, says Culley, essential diplomacy that took time but proved ultimately successful.
In the case of the Bradford pear, for instance, nursery owners were concerned about losing the economic benefit of the popular tree, she says; “so the challenge was helping them reconcile its marketplace value with its expense as an invasive.” On the other side, land managers wanted the trees “gone yesterday,” she says.
Ultimately the prohibition on selling the Bradford pear was given a phase-out period of five years, to January 2023, in recognition of the time and money spent developing nursery stock.
Over the last few years, Culley has continued to lead the OIPC team evaluating problematic plants using a science-based protocol developed by the group. The OIPC tool is unique among many of those used by other states, she says, in that it does not consider economic importance, difficulty of control, or aesthetic merit in its scoring process.
Through it all, Culley has maintained her teaching load at U.C.; sometimes recruiting undergraduate students for the invasive evaluation process.
She sees this effort as paying back the investigatory gifts she received from her advanced-degree mentors. “I try to take the knowledge that I’ve been given and translate it into change,” Culley says. “Hopefully it will inspire emerging scientists to do the same.”
