Hot Springs National Park is testing the use of goats for park maintenance, namely the removal of unwanted plants.
The herd of goats, which was released into the park at 11 a.m. Tuesday by Stafford Goat Rental of Vilonia, is part of the park's effort to exterminate invasive foliage from the park's wooded areas. The goats will live in a three-acre fenced-in area in the park for the next five weeks, where the effectiveness of their plant consumption will be measured. The arrangements for the goats were made possible by the efforts of the Exotic Plant Management Team, donator Craig Young and Environmental Stewards as well as the park's Geological Resources and Youth Programs divisions.
Shelley Todd, Natural Resource program manager and leader of the project, said the park hopes to use the goats to exterminate Nandina Domestica, a flowering plant within the park that produces berries with a cyanide compound. She said that goats are an ideal candidate for extermination of such a harmful substance given their effectiveness in exterminating other toxic plants. She noted Wilson Park in Fayetteville and Point Reyes National Seashore in California as examples of such effectiveness.
"They were used (at Point Reyes) to control the Hemlock population," Todd said. "With hemlock, which is poisonous to pretty much everything that eats it, goats were a great solution."
One of the main reasons the park is using goats to exterminate invasive plant species is the sensitive nature of some of the park's environments -- particularly locations that hold thermal or spring water, according to Mike Kusch, chief of Resource Management and Visitor Services.
Emily Roberts, Invasive Species Management intern, also explained that the park service expects that the use of goats will keep the park service from pulling plants up from their roots, which affects the park's ground.
"With hand-removing some of these species, it would require pulling up the roots and disturbing the ground," Roberts said. "It has potential to disturb archaeological artifacts."
The park service's notion of using goats for plant care was born out of an interaction with Arkansas Career Training Institute, a state agency that neighbors the park's property. Kusch said the park service was looking for a way to engage the plants without using laborers or chemicals when ACTI asked if it had an issue with using goats on the neighboring property for that exact reason.
"We were talking about it, and then we got a call from Arkansas Career Training Institute asking if there was a problem with using goats there on our property, just to make sure there wasn't going to be any negative impact to the park itself," Kusch said. "There wasn't, and that's when Shelley and I started talking about, 'Can we have goats here?'"
The park service has laid out 40 one-meter land plots within the fenced-in area. Prior to the herd's release, the park took inventory of every species of plant in each land plot so that they can compare the land before and after the goats' presence. The findings of this study will determine how the park chooses to treat invasive plants going forward.
"It depends on the data that we collect in the end," Roberts said. "If we find that the goats are a viable alternative to maintaining these invasive species, then we may incorporate them into future plans."
Local on 06/29/2016