News

2 November 2015

New people trained in the fight against common reed

On the 21 October 2015, 27 new people attended, at the Montreal Botanical Gardens, the workshop on common reed control given by the Université de Montréal in the context of invasive plant training. This brings the total number of people trained, since the worshop’s inception (March 2014), to 119. Common reed beware! The next training […]

---

20 May 2015

Conference on the invasive common reed at the IRBV

A conference titled “Ecophysiology of the common reed: a cosmopolitan invasive species” will be given at the Institut de recherche en biologie végétale on Friday, 29 May 2015. The speaker will be Hans Brix, Director of the Bioscience Department at Aarhus University (Denmark). For more information, visit the IRBV’s website.

---

14 May 2015

Workshop on the identification of exotic invasive plants in southern Québec

A workshop on the identification of exotic invasive plants in southern Québec will be held on June 2, 3 and 4 in Québec, under the aegis of the Bureau d’écologie appliquée et du Ministère du Développement durable, de l’Environnement et de la Lutte aux changements climatiques du Québec. This workshop is complimentary to those given […]

---

4 May 2015

Best wishes for a great retirement Yves Bédard!

Yves Bédard, a biologist at the Ministère des Transports du Québec, recently retired after many decades of good and faithful service. Yves was one of the most passionate advocates and supporters of the PHRAGMITES Group, and thanks to him the group was able to undertake large scale studies on the prevention of roadside reed invasions. It […]

---

27 April 2015

New student recruited by the PHRAGMITES Group

François Messier, a masters student in plant science at Laval University under the direction of Line Rochefort and codirected by Claude Lavoie, has undertaken a project to eradicate invasive common reed populations which have established in peatlands following horticultural peat extraction. He is using tarping techniques which were first tested at the Institut de recherche […]

---

16 April 2015

Giant hogweed workshop in the Bas-Saint-Laurent

No less than 24 participants from ministries, municipalities, parks and watershed organizations were present on 14 April 2015 in Rimouski at a special «Bas-Saint-Laurent» workshop on the war against giant hogweed. The workshop was given by Claude Lavoie and organized by the regional department of public health. In addition to eradication techniques, the orchestration of a […]

---

17 February 2015

Article on PHRAGMITES Group in Le Fil

An article summarizing research done by the PHRAGMITES Group on invasive common reed, and highlighting the works of Mélissa Larochelle (fish), Noémie Gagnon Lupien (birds), Marie-Andrée Tougas-Tellier (climate change) as well as the team of Marc Mazerolle (amphibians) was published on February 12, 2015 in Le Fil, the Université Laval newspaper. The article (in French), “Un envahisseur inoffensif […]

---

3 February 2015

The PHRAGMITES Group collaborates on a blog

Claude Lavoie recently published a post for the Great Lakes PHRAGMITES Collaborative blog, on the impacts of climate change on the common reed invasion in the St. Lawrence River wetlands. The post, “Freshwater Wetlands: fertile grounds for the invasive Phragmites australis in a climate change context“, may be read by clicking on the hyperlink.

---

Symposium on the common reed at the SWS annual meeting

A symposium on Phragmites australis will be held during the annual meeting of the Society of Wetland Scientists, from May 31st  to June 4th, 2015, in Rhode Island, U.S.A. The abstract submission deadline is 11th February 2015. For more information, contact Tom Mozdzer (tmozdzer@brynmawr.edu) or visit the SWS’s website.

---

18 January 2015

Invasive plants workshop: a great success

The latest edition of the workshop INVASIVE PLANTS: ERADICATION, CONTROL AND PREVENTION given by the groups PHRAGMITES and QuéBERCE in November 2014 (Montreal, Quebec) was a great success. No less than 80 people attended the various sessions. Remarquably, a post-workshop satisfaction survey revealed that 100% of the participants would recommend this training. Here are a […]

---