Livestock Wala'au

Exploring Hawaii's Grasslands: Kevin Faccenda and the Hawaii Grass Atlas

• Melelani Oshiro & Shannon Sand • Season 4 • Episode 7

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Curious about the hidden dynamics of Hawaii’s grasslands? Join us as we speak with Kevin Basienda, a passionate graduate researcher from the University of Hawaii, who has embarked on a mission to map out the lush yet invasive grass species across the islands. Intrigued by the complexities of these plant invaders, Kevin's journey led him to create the Hawaii Grass Atlas, a treasure trove of information featuring over 280 grass species. Through innovative data collection methods, including roadside surveys and the invaluable input from citizen scientists on platforms like iNaturalist, Kevin sheds light on the importance of making this wealth of information accessible to landowners and producers striving to manage their landscapes more effectively.

Ever wondered how fire-promoting grasses could alter the Hawaiian ecosystem? In this conversation, Kevin unveils the significant efforts behind documenting these fiery culprits using GIS data and enriched historical records. He introduces us to some captivating hybrids, such as Kentris paragrinus and a unique Chloris species hybrid found in Oahu, exploring their potential impacts on the environment. Through this engaging episode, we also delve into how iNaturalist serves as a powerful tool for community engagement, transforming nature exploration into a collective endeavor. Whether you’re a botanist at heart or simply intrigued by the natural world, this episode promises an insightful look into the challenges and beauty of managing Hawaii’s grass species.

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Speaker 2:

Aloha. Today's episode is sponsored by the Livestock Extension Group out of the University of Hawaii Manoa College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources, the Center for Ag Profitability out of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program.

Speaker 3:

Aloha and welcome to the Livestock Bala'au, a podcast aimed to provide educational support, information, guidance and outreach to our livestock stakeholders. We are your hosts, melio Shiro and Shannon Sand, and today we are talking with Kevin Basienda, with the University of Hawaii, and I'm going to let him give a little bit introduction about him and his position and, yeah, what we'll be talking about today. So thank you, kevin, for joining us and taking time today to talk story.

Speaker 4:

Thank you for inviting me. So I'm Kevin. I'm a graduate researcher at University of Hawaii, at Onewa, so I started at University of Hawaii about four years ago now. So I have been at University of Hawaii getting my PhD in invasive species effectively been my research. So when I got here, I just wanted to study invasive species generally and Hawaii seemed to be a great spot to do that more invasive species than most other places of the world and so when I got here, my advisor pushed me towards grasses because he knew that this group needed a bit more attention and obviously they're a hugely ecologically important part of the island, covering about a third of all of the land of the islands at this point, and he was pointing out that there's some issues with that are like the data that exists about where they grow and like their identities, even like what species are growing across the landscape. So I started I decided to take that on as as my project to try and kind of clean up the data about grasses in hawaii.

Speaker 4:

So I started coming to the bishop museum and they have a large grass plant collection called a herbarium here I'm actually at the Bishop Museum right now as we speak, but they have this large collection of about 10,000 dried breast plants, going all the way back to the late 1800s, so you can look at these specimens and see how the flora has changed over time, when species are starting to come in, and you can travel the islands without leaving the room. You can look at specimens from Puna or Niihau or wherever across the island just by pulling stuff out of the cabinet, and so that's really useful for confirming identities and updating distributions, because maybe there's something that somebody collected in 1970, and they just knew it was a grass, but then I'd come along and say, oh, that's this specific grass, that's andropogon, and so I can identify that and say, oh, that's never been recorded on Kauai before, so that's a new record, so we can date the list of grasses, and that's kind of how this project began. Very cool, very cool.

Speaker 2:

So tell us a little bit more about this project, because this, I mean this sounds really interesting like cataloging all of the different like grass species. I mean, honestly, I can't imagine I feel a little overwhelmed thinking about it.

Speaker 4:

For you to be fair, yeah, so when I started this work I was just publishing these kind of technical report papers saying there's a new grass on Kauai, a new one on Big Island and kind of so on, just enumerating these grasses. A lot of them didn't have photos in the publications. It was not really for a kind of super general audience, it was more of a technical thing, and so all of that data was available. But I wanted to make it more easily interpretable. So after three rounds of those that his paper is updating grass distributions, I decided to make a website. So that website is melunet slash atlas, or if you Google Hawaii Grass Atlas, it should be the first result. It has been recently, and so this website has maps of all of the grasses that are currently known to be growing wild in Hawaii, including natives, so there's about 280 species featured on the website. There's a few grasses there's like 40 or so that haven't been seen in the past 50 years. Some of them might still be around. Some of them, or most of them, are probably probably died off. Those ones aren't included in the website. So there's the chance you could find something growing on the landscape that isn't on the website, but it's probably unlikely.

Speaker 4:

And then. So there's these maps across the islands. These maps are based on data from roadside surveys. So over the past three years I've been going around the islands, I've made it to most of the islands, doing these roadside-based surveys, where I pull over every mile or so and record all of the grasses that are growing on the on the side of the road, and so that data is all on the website, as well as data from the museum with the herbarium specimens, as well as data from a vegetation plot.

Speaker 4:

So, like, the national parks have an extensive network of vegetation plots where they record all of these, these grasses and trees and everything, as well as data from from citizen science, like websites like iNaturalist, which I think we'll talk a bit about later, and so all of that data kind of got bundled up together. I cleaned up all of the messy names and the points that are in the middle of the ocean and all of that and but these, these maps up on the website, and then the website also has photos of every grass so you can compare the map, compare the photo and see if the area matches where you are. And if the photo matches, then it's in help with grass identification.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's amazing. I think that it's nice to have this sole source of where we can go to kind of search and look for it. There's so many different ones, and I guess that was my thing was how can we share this now so that producers can sort of use the information that's there, whether it's identification or just finding out more information about the grasses that are in their property?

Speaker 4:

So this website. I designed it to make it as easily accessible as possible. So, in addition to having all of these maps, there's also filters. So say you're on Maui, you can filter all of the grasses on Maui and then you can sub-filter that down and say that you know this grass. You only want to look at grasses that are clump-forming. You don't want to look at grasses with rhizomes or stolons or anything like that. You can filter by grasses on Maui that just have stolons or that are just clump forming, as well as based on shape, like inflorescence characters If you have a flower head, whether it's like a panicle or a spike or like a bracteose panicle, like an andropogon.

Speaker 4:

So I tried to make it as filterable as possible and for use cases I imagine some of the main ones will be I'm not sure like weed identification you can see what weeds are potentially going to expand into your area, stuff like wiregrass or andropogon bicordis or other weedy andropogon type grasses.

Speaker 4:

You can see where they currently are and for a bunch of the grasses for about 140 of them, so about half I've also used climate data to predict what areas are climatically suitable for these grasses, so you can see where they currently are and what areas they might expand into.

Speaker 4:

So these maps use rainfall data and temperature data and it kind of predicts that kind of using a machine learning approach to see what areas are going to be suitable in the current climate conditions for these grasses. So this kind of ignores the ecology of the grasses. So it'll say that shade tolerant or like species that only grow in shade, like Ohno, would be able to occur at areas that are sunny. So it doesn't know about site conditions, it just knows about temperature and moisture. So suppose there was a forest, it would be suitable, but if it's an open pasture then it probably wouldn't. And it also doesn't know about other grasses which would outcompete things. There are plenty of grasses which are suitable at certain areas, but the areas are currently covered by guinea grass which would shade them out. So it knows about, it doesn't know about site conditions, but it knows what areas are possible for the grass to grow, given the right site conditions, and so that that, I think, will be.

Speaker 2:

Is that something you're potentially going to ask that in the future is site conditions conditions. Kevin, sorry to interrupt you.

Speaker 4:

I don't think so. It's too fine scale data that I don't think it would kind of last very long. So like, say, I were to get data from 24 and then say that an area burns down or something, then all of a sudden the site conditions are changed and that map goes out the window. So I think I'm going to keep it just based on climate.

Speaker 3:

True. Okay, I don't know if you said this or not, but do you have it linked into any type of nutritional quality for the forages or grasses that are on there?

Speaker 4:

Not yet. That's something that I'm thinking I might include in the future. So this is currently the second version of the atlas. I'm going to keep adding to this after I graduate, adding in more information. So right now it's the maps. There's a few basic facts about the grasses, like whether it's native, whether it's a cool season grass or a warm season grass, the year it was introduced to hawaii, things like that. But then then oh, and also descriptions. So I have like scientific descriptions, measuring, like the height of the grass and all of the characters, of the width of the leaves and all of those kind of nitty gritty, the size of the spikelets, all of those characters. But I want to add in more ecological information. But I want to add in more ecological information, so like the palatability information and well, it's like fire characteristics and soil preferences and things like that, and that's that's eventually going to happen.

Speaker 2:

I don't have a timeline for it though. Yeah, so is OK. I don't know if you stated this earlier, but is this grant funded as part of your graduate program or is this just something you're super interested in, so kind of started on your own? I'm sorry, I might have missed that part earlier.

Speaker 4:

So this is not a grant funded product.

Speaker 2:

So that the Web site itself is, I'm hosting it by myself with my own like web server and everything, but it was wow. Okay, that's amazing. I would imagine a lot of people would be interested in this information yeah, so so nobody.

Speaker 4:

So I had funding for the roadside surveys for looking for new fire promoting grasses. So that was the the main part of this that was funded. But in terms of the development, that was all in my free time, because we just don't have good information about grasses in Hawaii Like before that MRCS publication came out earlier last year?

Speaker 4:

No, they don't, that's why I think this is an amazing resource. Yeah, so I wanted to try to fill that in. I mean, there is a lot of overlap with my research. Like all of the island distributions, all of the GIS data was made for one of my other projects, so it was not too much work. It was a lot of work, but it wasn't too much work to throw it all together on this website.

Speaker 3:

I think it's a great resource, though, to be able to have it all together. We do have a lot of historical like you, like you said information, but nothing that's been updated with colored photos which help through some of the drawings that you see in some of the publications. It's not so easy to match and identify sometimes, so it's nice to have updated photos and images for things and such. I want to just ask I think when I spoke to you previously, we talked a little bit about one of the hybrids and we want to talk a little bit about the hybrid that we mentioned with Kikuyu and the fountain grass, because you had a part in that naming convention, correct?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, so that was one of the grasses that I found it on a roadside survey on the old saddle road, irwimea. I was initially very confused as to what it was. I was trying to identify it. I couldn't come up with anything and then I just kind of forgot about it for a little bit. And then I stumbled upon a specimen in the herbarium which was filed as fountain grass and it was saying it was a hybrid. I was like oh wow, that's the exact same thing that I found. And then I realized that people had known about this hybrid for at least 40 years. At this point there's a specimen in the museum going back to the late 80s and nobody had ever documented it.

Speaker 4:

I kind of like wrote it down. It seems like most of the information about it seems to be kind of oral, passed along like that. So I did some genetics on it, trying to figure out what's going on. So it looks like the Kikuyu is the female parent and then Fountain is the male parent, which kind of makes sense because Fountain Grass has really weird genetics. Fountain grass is actually a triploid grass, which is very unusual as far as because triploids are generally sterile, so, like bananas, they don't have seeds because they're triploid, because they can't, like at the cellular level, make seeds, because they have the wrong number of chromosomes. But fountain grass is able to make seeds effectively asexually. So I think there's a study like 10 years ago looking at fountain grass on the big island and they found that it's all basically genetically identical because it just keeps cloning itself and it doesn't actually like breed, doesn't actually outcross, which is really weird. But it makes sense why it would be the male parent and the kikuyu because it can't make seed would be the, the female parent.

Speaker 4:

And then I only was able to look at one clump in terms of looking for seeds. I didn't manage to find any seeds on that plant. They are all empty, empty flowers. So it looks like it's sterile, which is what everybody, everybody says. But it it is possible that that something weird could happen in the future. They're, they're documented cases of hybrid grasses. All of a sudden they like double their chromosomes or something and boom, they're, they're fertile and they start pumping out seed. And that happened with a, with a salt marsh grass in the in the british islands, and then that was a really bad invasive actually like. But no idea what'll happen here. It looks like it'll. It's currently sterile, but who knows how that'll long. And then I ended up using the grass Kentris paragrinus, or, as the hybrid, kentris X paragrinus. So now it has an official name, in addition to the joy grass name, I guess is what some people call it, or the mountain hybrid, or kikuyu hybrid. It seems like it has a bunch of names, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

Oh yeah, I thought that was really cool. Yeah, but it makes it the usable forage at that point right when it becomes a hybrid, because the cattle do like to graze it much more than they won't touch the fountain grass yeah, the leaves are. Oh well, thank you that.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, I thought that was really interesting when you talk about that, yeah, there was another grass too that I also named as a hybrid, which is a hybrid between two Chloris species, between stargrass and the kind of Chloris barbata, that weedy one that grows in dry areas. That one was found on Oahu, but it's probably on other islands too. That one would be really hard to ID in the field, though it looks really similar to other, not to the stargrass. I'm kind of interested that these invasive species are hybridizing.

Speaker 3:

So you mentioned quickly earlier too about another program that can help with plant ID iNaturalist. You want to talk a little bit about that program?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, so iNaturalist is a website. It's kind of a nonprofit type of thing. So there's an app, there's a website and the purpose is to connect people with nature by kind of learning about the plants. So it's one way to think about. It is like Pokemon, but for biology. So you can take a picture of a plant on your phone and then there's a AI that'll use the picture from your camera to suggest what plant you actually took a picture of. So then you can catalog that plant, upload it to the website and then, once it goes onto the website, the identification gets confirmed by volunteers. So if you find like something unknown growing wherever, you can take a picture of it and then if the AI will suggest something it might not be right. It tends to be about 90% accurate in Hawaii with plants, which is pretty good as far as like.

Speaker 2:

That's pretty good, considering the variety of species yeah, it's, it's not.

Speaker 4:

It's not quite as good with like native speed, with like rare native species or cultivated things, but if you're looking at something that's growing wild or at like common natives, it's really good with those. And then you can also, if you know it, the AI suggestion is wrong you can just put in whatever name that you already know it is, and then it goes to volunteers who will confirm the identity. So I review all of the grasses and plants and sedges and basically all of the terrestrial plants that are posted across the islands of Hawaii, and so people post all sorts of stuff, from Belgateria trees to Chinese hibiscus growing in front of hotels and everything in between, and so I go through and confirm all of those identifications and help people out by fixing mistaken identities, and that's a really useful tool for learning about the plants in an area, because there's just this kind of global. This isn't a Hawaii.

Speaker 2:

I feel like plant ID is just so difficult.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, yeah, and it's not just a Hawaii-based, I just imagine it's being real, it's global. So there's like experts that live in, live in like germany or new zealand or whatever, and then they'll identify plants across the the world. So there's some people who identify eucalyptus who live in australia, so like they know what they're talking about when they identify eucalyptus. So it's a really great, great platform to interact with other people who are interested in in nature and just learn about the species that are growing in your in your area.

Speaker 2:

So is it like a phone app or is it like a web application where you go to like iNaturalistcom or org? I'm? We'll put it in the show notes for sure, whatever it is, but yeah.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, so there's phone apps for Android and iPhone. I personally think the website is a bit better. It's a little bit. I think the interface is a bit less clunky on the website, but you can just take a photo on your phone and then upload it on the website or you can just upload it directly in the phone app and you'll usually get an ID back from a volunteer within a couple days of posting.

Speaker 4:

And another reason I really like this is that a lot of the data for the Atlas has came from this website. So there's like 20,000 photos of points of grasses in Hawaii and some of these are areas that I have people haven't surveyed recently, like there's no vegetation blots or anything. So, like iNaturalist is the only kind of data source filling in some of these points on the maps on my website, which has been an amazing source of data because there's so much of it and the fact that it's all kind of open source. Like you can see the photo and double check that it's actually what they say it is. So I can confirm that, oh, this was fountain grass or this was Anthropogon virginicus or whatever species they say it is. It's all confirmable and it's also used by other scientists as well.

Speaker 2:

It's super useful nice right, and this is like just open source volunteer run yeah, it's all.

Speaker 4:

It's a non-profit, so there's the kind of parent company that runs all of it. The volunteers who identify the everything that's posted are kind of the, the backbone, the whole thing oh nice.

Speaker 2:

So anyone who has questions, if they're walking through a field and not sure what something is, they could just take a picture and then upload it to the website when they get to somewhere they have signal. If that doesn't have signal, or if they have signal there, they can upload you know.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I was going to say because I've used iNaturalist for things and it's nice because if you don't know like you might not know, you're familiar with the plant but you don't know the family or whatnot it kind of puts you in there. Then you can further investigate whatever plant it is. So, yeah, and I submitted things before that I weren't sure about or whatnot, and got back information. So yeah, it's great, whatnot and got back information. So, but yeah, it's, it's great, it's, it's cool to see that it you know that there are scientists behind there that's helping with the id and stuff and I think it's a good tool to be able to help you further identify things that are in your in your property and, just you know, gather another resource for you to gather more information about things.

Speaker 2:

So it's also ads free which is oh wow, that's kind of miraculous yeah, we, we did.

Speaker 4:

I worked with a collaborator doing a study kind of comparing the different apps that are currently on the app store for plant id and all of the other apps. They're, first of all, they're not as good in hawaii. They're better in temperate areas, but in terms of the they're not as good in. Hawaii. They're better in temperate areas, but in terms of the ads, they're just horrendous, whereas iNaturalist is all supported by donations, so no ads on there, which is a big plus.

Speaker 2:

Nice.

Speaker 3:

Well, is there anything else you'd like to share, Kevin, about the work you're doing about the Hawaii Grass Atlas?

Speaker 4:

In terms of the Atlas. If you have any questions about grasses, you can shoot me an email. My contact info is on there. Or if you want help with grass IDs on iNaturalist, my username is at Kevin Vicenda, it's just my full name. So if you tag me on something on there I can take a look and any suggestions for future development of the Atlas are appreciated. I'm going to keep working on it, keep expanding it, add more photos, update the maps and any ways I could make it more usable. I intend to do that.

Speaker 2:

Nice. I took a scan through there earlier today and I was like I mean, granted, I'm pretty ignorant on just grasses in general, as Mele can attest to, but I thought it was fairly easy to navigate. So good job. Yeah, all right. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. We hope our listeners found this informative and that it will be useful to them.

Speaker 3:

We hope our listeners found this informative and that it'll be useful to them. Yeah, make sure to follow us on our social media pages the Livestock, Palau and Livestock Extension Group if you haven't already, and be sure to visit the UHC TAR Extension website and our YouTube channel For additional information about this topic, see those show notes of the podcast and the description box of our YouTube page.

Speaker 2:

Thanks for listening to the Livestock Palau. Before we go, show some love for your favorite podcast by leaving us a review anywhere you listen to this and then stay tuned for next month's episode no-transcript.