WWF boosts campaign to rid national parks of invasive plants
by John Vianney Nsimbe · The ObserverSixty per cent of Queen Elizabeth national park land is covered by invasive plant species, which wherever they grow, do suffocate growth and multiplication of the indigenous plant species that most herbivorous animals in the wild rely on as food.
Invasive plants are now proving to be a bigger threat to much of this protected area than poaching, which is an age-old phenomenon. However, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has for almost a year now been on a campaign to save a range of national parks from the ever-growing danger of invasive species.
During a recent tour of the Queen Elizabeth national park, Happy Ali, a communications officer at WWF, said WWF had injected money into a campaign, where the invasive species would be removed from the different parks where they have been sighted. Manpower has been deployed from the parks’ surrounding communities to do the work, which has created employment.
He said many animals had left those areas taken up by the invasive plant species. Warden Joseph Arinaitwe, the in-charge of Ecological Monitoring and Research at Queen Elizabeth national park, said the problem of invasive species has grown exponentially over the last 20 years.
“After a thorough study, we learnt that the animals were moving farther away from places where people used to see them frequently. The thing about the invasive species is the fact that most of them have thorns. Few animals like thorny places. So, they wander off to new feeding grounds, which we noted have of late been gardens of the neighbouring human communities, leading to more human-animal conflicts,” Arinaitwe said.
He said herbivorous animals migrate and destroy people’s gardens, but then the carnivorous animals follow them and eat people’s livestock or harm people. Then people retaliate by killing all these different animals which are supposed to be conserved for future generations.
Some of the commonest invasive species are Dichrostachys cinerea (sickle bush), Lantana camara, Opuntia vulgaris, Carpalis tormentosa and congress weed. They suck out the nutrients from the soil a lot more, hence starving the indigenous plants.