Department of Louisiana State Parks Approves LICI's Iris Management Proposal

May 6, 2023 Mandeville, La.

The Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation & Tourism's Louisiana State Parks has approved the Louisiana Iris Conservation Initiative's (LICI) proposal to manage and increase the number of I. nelsonii (Abbeville Red) Louisiana irises growing at the Palmetto Island State Park's boardwalk. The proposal was submitted to the park manager, Andrea Jones, three weeks ago. The department's naturalist approved LICI's proposal this week after reviewing the existing project and the future work to be done outlined in the proposal. LICI will now be a part of this important project to maintain and increase the number of I. nelsonii irises at the Palmetto Island State Park's boardwalk.

Photo: The boardwalk at Palmetto Island State Park where the I. nelsonii

species Louisiana iris planting is located.

The project began in 2011 as an idea proposed by the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries and then implemented by the Friends of Palmetto Island State Park, Inc. to plant rare I. nelsonii irises at the boardwalk as a way for the public to see them growing and blooming in their natural habitat. The only place where they grow in the wild is a nearby privately owned swamp that is not open to the public. "We will do our best to continue the hard work that has been done by Friends of Palmetto State Park's volunteers through the years since to maintain the plantings," says Gary Salathe, president of LICI.

Photo: The Palmetto Island State Park boardwalk has numerous informational

displays about the I. nelsonii irises.

After receiving the state's approval to move forward on the project, Salathe went to the boardwalk on Wednesday, April 5th, to meet with Andrea and Jennifer Viator, Interpretive Ranger for the Department of State Parks. Also attending the meeting was a Bayou Teche region civic booster, Peter Patout, who had joined Gary for the day.

Photo: Park manager Andrea Jones and Jennifer Viator, Interpretive Ranger for the Department of State Parks, are seen on the boardwalk during their meeting with representatives of the Louisiana Iris Conservation Initiative on May 4, 2023.

Peter took the opportunity to discuss with Andrea and Jennifer a Louisiana iris festival he is helping to organize for 2025. One day of the educational festival would take place at the park's boardwalk and focus on the rare Abbeville Red irises as they bloom. Andrea gave her permission for the festival planning to move forward and agreed to reserve the meeting room at the entrance to the boardwalk for the 2025 event.

Gary got down in the swamp as Peter met with the two. He removed the remaining iris cultivars that had been discovered growing among the Abbeville Red Louisiana irises at the boardwalk a few years after the planting was created in 2011. He also cut off all of the seed pods from the Abbeville Red irises since they likely cross-pollinated with the cultivars during the iris bloom last month.

Photo: LICI's Gary Salathe is seen removing the seed pods from every iris within the swamp at the boardwalk on April 5, 2023. It is likely that all of the I. nelsonii irises cross-pollinated with Louisiana iris cultivars that were growing and blooming among them.

Photo: Light blue Louisiana iris cultivars blooming among the I. nelsonii irises on April 5, 2023 in the swamp at the Palmetto Island State Park boardwalk.

This is LICI's proposal to the State Park:

• We will remove the last of the iris cultivars from the boardwalk area.

• We will remove the seed pods from all of the irises in the boardwalk planting.

• We will grow out 800 – 1,000 I. nelsonii irises at our iris holding area that are being donated by Kent Benton.

• We will plant any of the irises donated by Kent Benton that have grown large enough into the boardwalk area this fall when the water level is low.

• We will remove any questionable non-Abbeville Red irises during the 2024 spring bloom.

• We will market the boardwalk irises as they bloom to attract the public's attention to help publicize these rare irises and the park’s role in preserving them.

• We will thin out the irises in the future, when needed, for possible planting into the Abbeville Swamp.

• We will welcome any group to partner with us that is willing to help with the work or donate funds to help offset the project's cost.

Photo: The I. nelsonii irises donated by Kent Benton will be grown in containers at the Louisiana Iris Conservation Initiative's iris holding area like these irises. The photo is from a volunteer iris planting event in January at LICI's iris holding area.

The iris seedlings are being donated to LICI by iris enthusiast Kent Benton of Livingston Parish. Kent has been very interested in the I. nelsonii species of the Louisiana iris for many years. A few years ago, he developed a way to propagate them from seeds using pollen collected from the Palmetto Island State Park's boardwalk irises with the then-manager's permission. He is a preservationist of this rare species of iris and is interested, along with others, in helping preserve their only native habitat; the nearby privately owned Abbeville Swamp.

Photo: LICI's volunteer, Kent Benton, is seen collecting pollen from a few of the I. nelsonii irises blooming at the Palmetto Island State Park on a March 23rd visit to the park with Gary Salathe to meet with representatives of the Friends of Palmetto Island State Park.

He received permission from the then-manager of the park

to produce more I. nelsonii seedlings for next year.

Gary was also met at the park's boardwalk on Thursday by a board member of the Friends of Palmetto Island State Park, Inc. non-profit. On behalf of the board, he invited Gary to speak at their May 30th board of directors meeting about a proposal LICI made to them last month to partner with them on the project by either directly being involved or helping with funding. Gary accepted the invitation.

Photo: I. nelsonii species of the Louisiana iris blooming in the swamp at the boardwalk in Palmetto Island State Park on April 5, 2023.

"We appreciate the encouragement and support we have received from the park's manager and other Department of State Parks staff members. It is always easier to come into a project after others have already done much work. We appreciate the hard work that has gone into this project to get it started in 2011 by the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries and the Friends of the Palmetto Island State Park and the work that members of the Friends group have done since then to try and maintain it. We are looking forward to doing our part to continue their work," Salathe said.

Photo: (left to right) Jennifer Viator, Interpretive Ranger for the Department of State Parks, Andrea Jones, park manager, and LICI's Gary Salathe, at the end of their meeting

at the park's boardwalk on April 5, 2023.

LICI Tours Parts of Privately Owned Abbeville Swamp - Home to The I. Nelsonii Iris

April 10, 2023 Abbeville, La.

The Louisiana Iris Conservation Initiative (LICI) was invited last month by one of the families that own the Abbeville Swamp, near Abbeville, La., to tour portions of their swamp. The swamp is a privately owned swamp that is the only place in the world where the I. nelsonii species of the Louisiana iris grows in the wild. The iris' common name is the Abbeville Red.

The visit was postponed until the irises in the swamp were blooming, which began at the end of March. LICI organized a small group to do the tour last week on Wednesday, April 5th, 2023.

Photo: (Left to right) Randall Perrin, one of the family members of the owners of the swamp, Gary Salathe, LICI president, Kent Benton, LICI volunteer and iris enthusiast, Forest Benton, LICI volunteer and Mark Schexnayder, president of the Society for Louisiana Irises are shown just before beginning their walk into the Abbeville Swamp on April, 5th. Photo by Henry Cancienne.

LICI invited Mark Schexnayder to join the tour of the swamp. He is retired from the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries, works for Batture LLC, an environmental engineering company, and is president of the Society for Louisiana Irises. While he was working with the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries (WL&F), Mark participated in several trips to the Abbeville Swamp as part of the annual monitoring the WL&F was doing of the irises growing in the swamp. He also helped organize a WL&F-sponsored planting of some I. nelsonii irises at the Palmetto Island State boardwalk in 2011.

Photo: I. nelsonii irises are shown growing in their natural habitat at the Abbeville Swamp on April 5th. Photo by Henry Cancienne.

The Friends of the Palmetto Island State Park has accepted LICI's offer to take over the management of the irises at the park's boardwalk and to increase their numbers. LICI has submitted a proposal to the Department of State Parks to accomplish these goals. The Friend's group is also discussing with LICI the idea that they could become a partner in the project by supplying funding to cover LICI's expenses for the project.

Photo (Left to right) Kent Benton, Forest Benton, and Gary Salathe are seen in a clump of Abbeville Red iris on April 5th in the Abbeville Swamp. Photo by Henry Cancienne.

"We are hopeful that our tour of the Abbeville Swamp will be the beginning of our learning how LICI, other interested groups, and individuals can help the landowners preserve their special property and their special irises within it, " Salathe sums up.

Nicholls State University Invites LICI to Participate in Wetlands Project at Nicholls Farm

April 3, 2023 Thibodaux, La.

Nicholls State University has invited the Louisiana Iris Conservation Initiative (LICI) to become a partner in a new project where construction is almost completed at the university's Experimental Farm. LICI's representative, Gary Salathe, was invited to tour the project site back in mid-2022, after which he expressed a definite interest in his non-profit becoming involved. As construction neared completion in March of 2023, he toured the site again and worked out an agreement with the head of Nicholls State University's Biology Department and leader of the wetlands project, Quinton Fontenot, for LICI to become a part of the project.

Photo: The project's construction was completed in early 2023 with the exception of electric lines needing to be installed to the pump along Bayou Folse. Utility company crews were delayed installing the electric lines due to weekly rain storms the area

experienced in March and April.

Nicholls State University is located in the small south-central rural Louisiana town of Thibodaux, Louisiana. Its 277-acre Nicholls Farm is located just outside of town, a few miles down LA Highway 1. The Farm is an integral part of the university’s plans to become Louisiana's coastal restoration research center. In recent years, Nicholls Biology Department has produced over 30,000 black mangroves at the Nicholls Farm, which were planted in coastal marshes.

A master plan for the farm allows for putting sections of land into various uses, including classroom space, areas to test coastal restoration projects, and areas to grow plants for these types of projects. Ducks Unlimited, a national organization interested in preserving wetland habitats for ducks, approached the university about creating a wetland on their farm as one of the first of their experimental nutrient-reducing projects. They readily signed onto the project.

The purpose of the Nicholls State University/Ducks Unlimited wetlands project is to use native marsh grasses and plants to remove access nutrients from Bayou Folse, which is adjacent to the wetlands site. Here's why:

Each summer in the Gulf of Mexico along portions of the Louisiana coast, the oxygen levels drop below 2 parts per million, creating a situation known as Hypoxia. The result is called the “dead zone” because the low-oxygen area is where bottom-living organisms will die and fish and shrimp will avoid. The creation of the dead zone is linked to the flow of two key nutrients down the Mississippi River, nitrogen and phosphorus, that are carried by melting snow and springtime rainfall to the Gulf of Mexico from farms, residential septic tanks, and city and towns’ sewage treatment plants within the river's watershed.

The map above is from a NOLA.com article.

The Mississippi River's freshwater creates a layer over the saltier Gulf water just off Louisiana's coast. The freshwater allows algae blooms to develop. When the algae bloom is over, it dies and sinks to the bottom of the Gulf, where it decomposes, using up oxygen. The low-oxygen conditions generally last until tropical storms or other weather events in late summer and early fall disrupt the layer of fresh water, mixing air from the surface into the saltwater on the bottom.

Obviously, for a state whose coastal areas depend on commercial and recreational fishing, this is a huge problem. It is also becoming a national embarrassment that as ecological concerns in much smaller habitats get plenty of media attention, very few people from the areas upstream in the Mississippi River watershed, where much of the nutrients come from, are even aware of this problem. It’s a problem, all right. Each summer, it often covers an area in the Gulf of Mexico the size of the state of Connecticut.

Image is from a NOLA.com article.

Much work has been done, and is being done, to understand the Gulf of Mexico's annual dead zone. The Harmful Algal Bloom and Hypoxia Research and Control Act of 1998 (HABHRCA 1998, reauthorized in 2004, 2014, and 2019) reaffirmed and expanded NOAA's mandate to advance scientific understanding of hypoxia, and support scientists' ability to detect, monitor, predict, and mitigate its occurrences. However, not much has been done in attempting to stop the source of the problem outside of enforcing EPA pollution regulations that typically are not focused on nutrients, until now.

Ducks Unlimited saw an opportunity to offer one solution to the problem of hypoxia and simultaneously solve another problem, how to increase the duck population. They have funded a number of demonstration projects in an attempt to show that creating wetlands near the source of the water runoff can significantly reduce the amount of nutrients entering the watershed. By planting native marsh plants within the wetlands and having the nutrient-laden water flow through, the plants will significantly reduce the amount of nutrients in the water that comes out the other end. This will help solve the first problem. It is thought that the supercharged wetlands full of these plants and nutrients will become the perfect breeding ground for ducks, helping solve the second problem.

Photo: The wetlands project site at Nicholls Farm is located on the map labeled "Bird Sanctuary" and the "Large Farm Plots" to its right.

The wetland project covers 21 acres of the Nicholls Farm. The plan is to pump water from Bayou Folse into the wetland, let the marsh plants remove the nutrients, and then return the clean water back to the bayou.

The bayou is really just a drainage canal at that upstream location. It drains nearby residential areas - many using individual septic tanks for sewerage treatment, some farmland and sugar cane fields (heavy fertilizer users), and some urban run-off from the town. The Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Entergy, and Lowland Construction all assisted with the development and implementation of the project.

Photo: The ability of Louisiana irises to remove nutrients from water and soil are well known. This photo is from a LICI iris rescue in 2020 on Bayou Road in St. Bernard Parish, La. The volunteers showed up with shovels, ready to dig up the irises, only to discover that the irises were all floating on the water's surface. They were growing hydroponically because nearby homes' individual home sewerage treatment plants had their outflows in the bayou, which is really just a large ditch at that location. The photo shows an iris with its huge

root system just plucked from the water.

LICI's job as a partner in the project is to organize iris rescues and then organize volunteer events to plant the irises into the wetlands project. The job of the irises is to remove nutrients from the water coming into the project from Bayou Folse. "In other words, this is an iris restoration project with a purpose other than just growing irises. It will be a working iris project," LICI's Salathe says.

LICI will be planting the I. giganticaerulea species of the Louisiana iris from their iris rescue program into the Nicholls Farm wetlands project.

The wetlands project will also offer LICI a location as a home for huge numbers of rescued I. giganticaerulea species of the Louisiana iris that they rescue from properties throughout Southeast Louisiana. "What better home for them than in the center of a university's farm that is dedicated to Louisiana coastal conservation and habitat restoration?" Salathe asks. The Nicholls Farm already produces other native plants, such as marsh grasses, that are used as seed stock for USDA-approved nurseries to grow out for use in marsh restoration projects. LICI's irises will just be added into the mix, Salathe believes. LICI has also agreed that in future years the irises they plant into the project can be thinned out for other restoration projects. "They will likely will become a source of irises for restoration projects all across south Louisiana for years to come," he says.