Broom Education and Eradication Program (BEEP): A Forest Ranch Community Action GroupBy Susan Mason
In the summer of 2006, a small group of Forest Ranch residents met with representatives of organizations and individuals who had been removing invasive broom plants from downstream sections of the Big Chico Creek watershed for a number of years. These residents, concerned about the alarming spread of this highly-flammable plant in the upper Big Chico Creek and Little Chico Creek watersheds, wanted to inform their community about the hazards of broom and also to start a volunteer program to help willing property owners remove their broom plants. By December, they’d formed BEEP (Broom Education and Eradication Program), recruited a steering committee, begun providing monthly articles for the local newspaper, raised money to support their work and identified broom pulling projects for the 2007 season. By February 2007, they were hard at work removing broom plants. From their inception, BEEP has reached out to other groups to make this a collaborative effort encompassing much of the watersheds’ area. They became an affiliate of the Big Chico Creek Watershed Alliance (BCCWA), which provides them with insurance and the non-profit status needed to accept tax-deductible donations as well as grants. Other partners who have contributed volunteer time, tools or funding include BEEP’s own volunteers, Big Chico Creek Ecological Reserve (BCCER), Butte College students, Butte County Fire-Safe Council, Butte County Dept. of Public Works, Butte County Resource Conservation District, CalFire, California Conservation Corps, California State Parks, Caltrans, CSU Chico faculty & students, Caltrans, City of Chico’s Park Division, Forest Ranch Post newspaper, Friends of Bidwell Park, Mt. Lassen Chapter of the California Native Plant Society, Sierra Pacific Industries, and Watersheds.us. In 2008, BEEP received a 2-year, $9,995 grant from the California Dept. of Food & Agriculture’s Weed Management Area program, to be administered by the Butte County Resource Conservation District. This funding was used to hire team leaders who supervised the volunteer work sessions and to pay for a part-time project coordinator. BEEP has leveraged this grant with $104,000 of in-kind cost share from their partners during the two years, an almost unheard of 1:10 ratio. More recently, BEEP has prepared and published a cookbook as a fund-raising effort for 2010. Of course, getting results is the most important part of this project. BEEP wanted to be able to measure their on-the-ground progress and decided the most straightforward way to do that was to count broom plants as they pulled them. In just 3 pulling seasons (broom can only be pulled when the ground has been saturated from winter rains), BEEP has removed more than 150,000 broom plants, including thousands of large, mature seed-producing plants! In these two watersheds French and Spanish broom are the most common, but in Paradise, for example, Scotch and French broom prevail. By any measurement, this has been and continues to be a highly successful program. BEEP has already identified their 2010 pulling areas and set the pulling dates, which are basically every Saturday morning in February and March. If you’d like to learn more about broom, help with BEEP’s broom eradication program, donate to help pay for their team leaders or want to start a similar program in your community, see the BCCWA’s web site www.bigchicocreek.org. It contains a calendar of winter 2010 pulling dates, how to contact BEEP, web sites with scientific data about Spanish, French and Scotch broom and how to eradicate it, and lots of background information about BEEP along with some of the outreach materials that they use. Since their grant funding is ending, they particularly need ideas about how to raise additional funding for team leaders. These paid leaders are an essential component to their success, because they reduce the otherwise inevitable volunteer burnout. From the Fall 2009 issue of the Environmental News. |
