Cultivating resilience: native revegetation for AIS resistance

Project background

MAISRC researchers are working to address a long-standing issue in lake management: invasive plants can be reduced through herbicide treatments, but native plant communities often do not rebound, leaving lakes vulnerable to reinvasion. Evidence from terrestrial systems shows that strong native communities can resist invasion, suggesting that active revegetation may help lakes break the cycle of repeated treatments. 

Barriers to restoration success are the small number of species currently used, the scarcity of commercially available plant materials, and the lack of standardized revegetation methods. Transplanting mature plants from donor lakes remains the common approach, but it is resource-intensive, carries cross-contamination risks, and restricts species options. Seed-based strategies could offer more scalable and diverse solutions, but aquatic seeds are difficult to harvest and propagate, and germination timing is not well understood. 

In this next phase, MAISRC researchers will broaden species evaluations, study early growth and survival under different environmental conditions, and launch lake revegetation experiments to see which species and methods are most effective at establishing invasion-resistant native plant communities. This work aims to expand the AIS management toolbox and provide clear, accessible guidance that supports wider adoption of revegetation in Minnesota lakes. 

Activities:

• Grow and evaluate the early development of native plant species to determine which are most suitable for lake restoration work.
• Collaborate with lake managers to set up consistent, side-by-side tests of different revegetation methods directly in lakes.
• Ensure that scientific findings are clear, accessible, and easily used by the people who manage and restore Minnesota’s lakes.

*Header photo by Abha Panda