The shores of Utah Lake used to be covered with phragmites. Normally, large reed grasses can be a good habitat for birds and other animals, but in this case, the non-native invasive species threatens the ecological health of the lake.
“Phragmites sucks up quite a bit of water,” said Utah Lake Authority deputy director Sam Braegger.
“I've heard a variety of estimates, but we're still talking in either low single digits or maybe low double digits, of the water that's available in the lake gets sucked up into phragmites.”
They also get in the way of anyone trying to hike along the lake’s shoreline. Braegger remembers a time in 2016 when “I literally was laying my body down trying to smush phragmites in front of me because I could not push through it.”
That’s because the plants “grow very dense, which doesn’t allow most species of birds or mammals to be able to get in there and have a nest like they can in cattails or bulrushes or sedges, where those are a little bit more spread out.”
So for more than a decade, Utah county and state officials have been working on a solution. The phragmites get sprayed, and then workers come in with machinery called a marsh master to cut down or trample the plants. Other programs have used cattle grazing to clear phragmites. It can take years to clear out a single section of shoreline, but these solutions are working.
Over the past 15 years, they’ve seen a 70% reduction in phragmites on the shoreline. With so much of it gone, there’s finally room to replant native species.
That’s why the Utah Lake Authority held a series of “planting parties.” Groups of volunteers, mostly from local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints wards, participated in a pilot program to see which native plants would do the best along the shore.
They were given dibbles, a tool to make small deep holes, along with native grasses to plant.
BYU student Gregory Bastian planted a chairmaker's bulrush, which he said “looks like it could be overgrown turf grass, to be honest.” That may be true, but it’s also a native plant that’s well suited to this ecosystem. That means it won’t suck up too much water, harm wildlife, or crowd out other plants.
Volunteers also planted Nebraska sedge, Rocky Mountain bee plants, and creeping spike rush.
Braegger said they will see which plants do the best in specific parts of the lake before starting larger projects to replant the shoreline in the future.
“That'll become an annual process of mowing down and getting rid of the Phragmites, putting in some new vegetation and monitoring it and trying to further adapt and improve the process so that eventually we're working towards, you know, a whole restoration of the shoreline.”
