2020 Integrated Weed Maintenance Calendar

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4-County Cooperative Weed Management Area’s Integrated Weed Maintenance Calendar has been updated! View/Download the 2020 Integrated Weed Maintenance Calendar here.

 
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Thanks to Mitch Bixby (Botanic Specialist with the City of Portland Bureau of Environmental Services and Vice-Chair of the 4-County Technical Committee) for providing us with background information about the weed management calendar, how it’s intended to be used, and where it will go from here.

One goal of Cooperative Weed Management Areas (CWMAs) is to create a space for organizations and agencies to partner together. This Weed Maintenance Calendar is one product of collaboration within the ‘Clackamas, Clark, Multnomah, Washington (4-County) CWMA,’ supporting the Portland metro area.   

Following a bond measure in 2013, Metro, Portland’s regional government and longstanding 4-County CWMA member, contracted with the City of Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Services (BES), also a 4-County member, to assemble a management calendar. The calendar would describe the current consensus about managing the weed species Metro staff expected to work on. Starting with King County’s weed management calendar, BES made adjustments based on interviews with local partners, and added some new summaries of the calendar.  In 2014, the Weed Maintenance Calendar arrived and the tool was, and still is, intended to reflect the prevailing opinion for managing the most common situations. The calendar was designed to be a starting point, requiring land managers to make case-by-case management decisions, which might very well diverge from the calendar. 

In 2019, the 4-County CWMA asked Metro to allow revisions for distribution to other land managers and Metro agreed. After a period of discussion (and also of pandemic), the Weed Maintenance Calendar has re-emerged! The revisions aren’t done, and won’t ever be -- we see this as a living document, with the capacity to adjust. As noted above, it’s fully expected that local conditions will require ‘a little more of this’ and ‘a little less of that’. 

While the Calendar might be useful to the general public, professional land managers have a range of opinions about many of these topics. Given the range of organizational priorities, goals, and missions, that is to be expected. 4-County CWMA urges folks who use this calendar to be aware of that range, and to build working relationships with local land managers: they are better able to advise you in your particular circumstances.

The 4-County Technical Committee will be asked to review this document each winter, and make changes as necessary. Please feel free to join the conversation, and watch for future updates. If you have any suggestions for the calendar, please contact Mitch Bixby (Mitch.Bixby@portlandoregon.gov).