Senate Standing Committee on Agriculture and Environment

Good morning, everybody. Welcome. I just wanted to open the Committee on Joint Committee on the House Committee on Agriculture, Culture and Food Systems, along with the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Environment. My name is Cory Chun. Next to me is Senator Mike Gabbard. And I'd just like to acknowledge the presence of my colleagues on the Committee.

Senator Matsumoto, Chris Kush and Alex. Senator Carl Rhodes. So today is informational briefing on the Hawaii Basin Species Council. This is Friday, January 16th. It's 10am and we are in conference room 325. And I'd like to turn over to Senator Gabbard for any opening remarks.

Okay. Hello, Maikako. And the purpose of the info briefing is to receive updates from the Hawai'i Invasive Species Council on their work in addressing invasive species concerns across the state. At FYI, this is my 10th year chairing the Agriculture Environment Committee. And I. Just turned 78 yesterday. So I'm still kicking, still going strong.

And biosecurity is one of my top priorities. Just want to make sure everyone knows that. And for those who don't know, biosecurity involves practices and policies to prevent the introduction and spread of of harmful organisms like viruses, bacteria, pests, or toxins that threaten humans, animals, plants, the environment or food supplies.

And there was a study that I ran across 2023 that's backed by the United nations saying that the estimated cost for economic costs associated with invasive species is $423 billion every year. That's with a B every year globally.

And so this includes damaged crops, infrastructure, increased labor, impacts on fisheries, and then as far as in island ecosystems, invasive species are the main driver of diversity loss and second leading driver of habitat destruction. And of course, invasive species increase the frequency and intensity of wildfires.

So let's begin and I'd like to introduce Patrick Chee, who will be our moderator for today's hearing. Patrick is the Interim Invasive species coordinator of DLNR DofA, that's the Department of Land and Natural Resources and the Division of Forestry and Wildlife, who supports the Hawaii Invasive Species Council.

Patrick previously was the Invasive species coordinator in 2007, and he went on to other related invasive species positions and projects around Hawaii, including most recently as DOFA's Small Mammal Controller Control planner. And during his tenure, Patrick advanced policies to improve invasive mammal control in the state and coordinated the team that successfully made Lehua Island rat free.

Let's give him another hand. So in November, Patrick was called back to DLNR DOFA to be the interim Invasive Species Coordinator and to support. So Patrick, I'll Turn it over to you.

Aloha. Thank you, Chair Gabbard, Chair Chun, Members of the Agriculture Committees, and of course everyone here, residents of Hawaii, thank you for inviting me to for this invasive species info briefing. Now let me share my screen. So this of course is the Hawaiian Invasive Species Council. And these are what is the Hawai'i Invasive Species Council.

As you folks probably already know, it is composed of six Member organizations, departments within the state as well as the Legislature. So from the top left, Department of Land on Natural Resources, Department of Agriculture, Department of Transportation, Department of Business, Economics and Tourism, University of Hawaii Department of Health, and the Hawaii Legislature.

This wall of words is what really creates the council.

You don't have to read it, but essentially it's saying that it's created, established in order to deal with invasive species in the states, maintain a broad overview of invasive species in the state, as well as advise, consult and coordinate invasive species related efforts with and between the Departments of Agriculture, Land and Natural Resources, Health, Transportation, et cetera, that I just listed, including also Federal, International, Private Labor.

I do have some handouts whenever Jeff gets back. Hopefully I'll hand that out to you folks and give you a little bit more overview.

But today's agenda, I'll be making some introductory remarks talking about our programs, projects and people in the Hawaiian Invasive Species Council as well as after that, the Then we'll talk about the three main programs or four main programs within the Hawaiian Business Species Council, including outreach, weed risk assessment, plant pono, as well as online pest reporting hotline, collaborative efforts.

And there's the handouts, port of entry monitoring. So as you can see with the handouts there, I can maybe get one copy. We have one extra right here. Okay, awesome. So you'll have my handy dandy business card if you need to reach me in the future, as well as the submittal that we sent out in December.

Regarding the essentially a submittal that the Hawaiian Invasive Species Council actually passed back in November during its last meeting. So following that is also the structure of our staff of which you'll be hearing from three of them. So you'll be hearing from Elizabeth Spieth, the early detection and rapid response and community liaison.

You'll be hearing from Mason, who will be talking about the research and projects coordinator. And he'll also be hearing from Chuck Chimera, who is our weed risk specialist. And that picture up there is not, not me, it's Chelsea. But she is our previous invasive species. Thank you for clarifying that.

And then the third thing in your packet is the projects funded in fiscal year 2026. Now in fiscal year 2026, the HISC was funded its usual amount and an additional 4.25 million which came along with Act 236. And just as an aside, the Act 236 monies has not yet been released from BNF President Finance.

So we are still awaiting its release so that we can at least get some of those programs going. But the other programs we're moving forward with, just as a comparison, in fiscal year 25, we only had 19 projects that we were able to fund.

But this year because of the bump up in funds, we were actually able to have 50 new projects. So thank you all for making that possible.

Now the other thing I'd like to point out is that when Hawaii Invasive Species Council was created back in 20022003 the Legislative Reference Bureau made it a point to say that in order for us to address all the invasive species needs, that they suggested that a budget of $10 million be given to the Hawaiian Invasive Species Council in order to effectuate invasive species control.

Of course, the budget has never been $10 million, but this is the closest that we've come. So thank you all for making that possible and you can see the difference that it makes.

So the other thing that happened in our last legislative year is that the HISC is going to be transitioned to the Department of Agriculture and biosecurity in 2030.

And so this submittal we addressed that saying that essentially we want to make sure that the HISC remains when it transfers to be a cabinet level interagency council and that there be a staffing transition. Just so you folks know, when the HISC was created, there are actually no positions created within the bill or within the Act.

So my position as Indasis Species Coordinator actually belongs to the Division of Forestry and Wildlife and when the transition happens, it will remain with the Division of Forestry and Wildlife.

So this position move, as well as the positions that were created by the Hawaiian NASA Species Council in order to effectuate these programs that we'll be talking about today, they were created using funds for the HISC, but they won't necessarily move over to the Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity unless the Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity makes their plans in order to make sure that those staff are there when the transition happens.

So these programs are of course the643test.org, weed risk assessments and the Port of Entry Monitoring, which we would like to make sure that is preserved into the the future. Additional note is that the funding, wherever the HYSC happens to be administered, should go to the Department wherever it happens to be administered.

There was a little bit of a mix up, I believe in the bill that passed in that in fiscal year 2027 there is an additional 4.25 million that will be for the HISC, but it's actually going to the Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity, even though the HISC will still be administered over at Department of Line of Natural Resources.

So either we'll need to do a journal voucher between the departments in order to make that right, or hopefully if the Legislature sees fit to correct that.

So in any case, in the future in this submittal, we also request that a recurring 5 million be appropriated to fund the HISC annually and be managed by whatever the administering Department might be. So that's mainly it for this presentation.

But I wanted to talk a little bit about, of course There are the 50 projects that are listed here. Many of them are the top part here is programmatic projects and then the rest are research funded projects. And then there's a little breakout for what are biocontrol projects that are funded.

The numbers on the side are actually not rankings. They're just available for us when we were doing our, our internal, you know, what, what proposal was what. So but nonetheless those projects are what we funded with 2026 funds. And also let me bring up.

So one of our big projects, although again, even though they sound similar, the Invasive Species Committees are actually not the HISC. The HISC did not create them. In fact, the HISC was created after most of the Invasive Species committees actually started their life.

But when the HISC was created, it was discovered that there were certain areas between the departments that were not being taken care of. Certain things like early detection and rapid response, they were not being covered by Department of Land and Natural Resources or Department of Agriculture or these other departments that are in the hi.

And so we asked the Invasive Species Committees if they could potentially fill that area and so they did. And so over the years, they have become an important part of our invasive species response across the state. They are in each of the counties.

Kisk, Kauai Invasive Species Committee, Oahu Invasive Species Committee, Little One on Molokai, which is part of Maui Invasive Species Committee, and then the Big Island Invasive Species Committee. They have successfully eradicated these various species.

I'm not going to go over them all, but there's quite a few of them and we are very appreciative that they got on board, they saw the need and they got rid of them quickly before they became an issue. And these are the current targets that they're working on right now.

So even though they eradicated a few, there's still a lot more to go. And they're constantly looking and checking on what is potentially a problem. A lot of these are plants and you'll hear about them, about how we figure out which ones are invasive through our presentation from Chuck regarding the weed risk assessments.

But nonetheless, these are the folks that are going out there actively getting rid of them out in our wildlands and forests. So speaking of weeds, there were 32,709 acres surveyed. There were 71,431 weeds controlled across the state.

And you know, in particular, looking at our priority species, we treated the poor little fire ants, we collected a variety of samples, surveyed a variety of acres and treated over 1,450 acres for little fire ant with the IS and then Koki frogs.

There are treated 114 sites, 30,142 acres surveyed and used over 44,321 pounds of citric acid in order to do that treatment.

And then probably one of our most problematic species, but which we are going at as best we can, is coconut rhinoceros beetle, of which There were over 8,000 palm surveys done, 792 traps deployed, 4,214 traps checks and a new relatively new tool, dog surveys, over 78 of them and surveys of mulch in order to check on whether or not 38 of them in order to check whether or not there are CRB in there.

In addition, the invasive species committees do outreach. Over 7,440 kens were reached, 29,383 person to person contacts were made and 804,867 people were reached via social media. Now just so you folks know, the funding that the HISC gives to the invasive species committees is not the only thing that they work on.

In fact, oftentimes a lot of what they ask us for we give them at a during their proposal they give us a number and we often cut that down to less than 50%. So they have to figure out how to make up that with other monies.

And so they do of which they this list of co funders for the invasive speeches committees that essentially leverages the funds that we give them from the states in order for them to do the work that they do.

So the vast majority of the funding is going towards their staff and a very little bit of it is going towards their material supplies and other administrative things and that's that. So let's see. I would like to go back to our agenda. We have now a chance to talk with our person Elizabeth Spieth.

She will be talking about our various outreach efforts. So let's stop share from here and let Elizabeth Spieth take over.

Aloha. Can everyone hear me?

Yeah.

Mahalo. Bear with me just one moment. I do appreciate mahalo to the Chairs, all Committee Members and everyone present today. I appreciate being able to join today from afar. I'm joining you from beautiful upcountry Maui, but I will need just a moment to get my share my screen with you. Can everybody see the screen now?

Yes.

Mahalo. I think I heard a yes. So as I said, my name is Elizabeth Spieth. I am one of the HISC support staff and also I help manage the statewide 643pass.org hotline.

I've been with HISC support for over eight years and in my role with the supporting the council and the support team, I help with with some of the community engagement and outreach.

And we wanted to take a few minutes since we had an opportunity at this info briefing to be able to share a bit more about what HISC has done to support invasive species over the past year. We just thought that we would take a few minutes to highlight some of our community engagement efforts that really stand out.

We think. So I'll start with telling you a little bit about Hawaii Invasive Species Awareness Month, or HISAM, and then touch briefly on our ongoing outreach through the Brown Bag Talks and our HISC YouTube channel. So the Hawaii Invasive Species Awareness Month, or HISAM, is a statewide month long public engagement campaign coordinated by HISC.

HISAM was originally inspired by Hawaii's participation in the National Invasive Species Awareness Weekly, but over time it became clear that one week wasn't enough to hold the conversation surrounding biosecurity that Hawaii needed. We expanded to a full month eight years ago and eventually moved HISAM to May, allowing for more Voices, activities and communities to participate statewide.

We're now so like I said, we're now eight years into having this month long hisam. It is somewhat nationally unique. There are very few invasive species efforts in the United States that dedicate an entire month to coordinated statewide outreach about invasive species. I'm pretty sure that we're the only one in the United States.

So in this way we act as a model for others with our commitment and engagement to this outreach about invasive species. So HISAM reaches across all islands and sectors, using education, storytelling, volunteering opportunities, as well as awards and recognition to make invasive species impacts and solutions visible to the public.

Since its inception in 2013, HISAM has included a formal state proclamation and legislative recognition. Over the years, governors, legislators and council Members have come together to publicly recognize invasive species work. So not just the policy, but also the people and partnerships that make it happen across Hawaii.

This public recognition reinforces that biosecurity is a shared Kuleana and that leadership shows up at every level. Now, I just wanted to point out that as support for this event, the Invasive Species Awareness Month has grown over the years. Hopefully you guys can see this clearly.

You can look at the number of people here in 2013 with Governor Abercrombie. Then throughout the years, here's 2017 and that proclamation of February at the time being the Invasive Species Awareness Month with Governor Ige. There's more people involved all the way up to the present here in 2024.

We see this more recently, all of the people from all levels of government being involved in Invasive Species Awareness Month activity, proclamation and activities. Also, another core part of Hawaii Invasive Species Awareness Month is our statewide awards program.

Since 2013, the his council has selected individuals and businesses from across Hawaii whose work represents exceptional leadership in invasive species prevention, management and stewardship.

Many legislators, including some of those of you in the room, have participated directly in these ceremonies, helping lift up biosecurity heroes and reinforcing that this work matters on all levels of at all the highest levels of the state. Looking ahead for 2026 HISAM, we'll soon be soliciting nominations for the next round of HISAM awards in three categories.

Outstanding Business Leader, Community Heroes and Islander County MVPs. Nomination forms will be shared through through the HISC email list which hopefully you all are signed up to. And we warmly welcome your input in helping us identify and recognize the people and organizations that are doing outstanding biosecurity work in your communities.

So as mentioned, this is a whole month long event and one of the things that's come up though in the past couple of years that's been quite successful is we've been through theming creating themes to help make a cohesive messaging across this whole month. Oh, I'm so sorry, let me do that again.

I don't know how that happened. There we go back to full screen. Some of the past themes that have been particularly resonant have been one year we did where everything was grounded in the vow from Va Kua to Vao Kanaka and Kahakai, helping connect invasive species impacts to place, place and cultural landscapes.

Another year we focused on the shared responsibility of invasive species with the message who protects Hawaii? You do so. It's a Kaako thing. This theme was inspired by outreach efforts in New Zealand Aotearoa, encouraging community engagement beyond simply reporting invasive species to the government.

But one of our most popular themes was in 2023 Mythbusters, addressing misconceptions about invasive species, which created a space for honest conversations between experts, land managers and community members, especially where misunderstanding about the biology, impacts and management often arise, sometimes through social media or word of mouth. So the hisense themes and schedules are developed by a HUI.

The HISC Public Outreach Working Group helps pull that HUI together and that has representation from agencies and partners across the State.

Planning for HISAM 2026 will begin soon and we welcome inspired ideas from anyone interested in helping and participating in that HUI or in help shaping future themes beyond HISAM HIC supports year round outreach through our Brown Bag Talks and the HISC YouTube channel.

The brownpack Talks or short lunchtime or coffee break presentations with invasive species experts and policymakers. They allow us to spotlight new and emerging research, evolving technologies and important work supported through HISC grants.

Since 2016 we have now accumulated through those HISAM presentations and events and these brown bags we have over 150 of these talks on the HISC YouTube channel, keeping this information accessible, searchable and firmly in the public domain.

And this ensures that whenever we're coming together for these events in these presentations that it doesn't just stop at that report or that meeting and that it continues to remain available to communities across Hawaii whenever and wherever people need them.

And to close this out and mahalo for this opportunity to kind of highlight some aspects of the the HISC supported community engagement that we don't necessarily get to dive into, but to close it out. I just wanted to say that all of this and much more is available at our HISC website.

And just to note that the invasive species profiles and outreach materials found currently hosted at DLNR but at the HISC website they are considered and used widely as authoritative online reference by the public partners, educators and the media and they help ensure that accurate science based information is consistently available statewide.

And as Pat was kind of alluding to, we're really hoping that as his Administration transfers that we can see these outreach and community engagement efforts as a critical public resource and that they will continue seamlessly maintaining the transparency, accessibility and trust that the Hawai'i across that the communities across Hawaii rely on. Mahalo.

I'll pass it back over to Pat.

Thank you so much, Elizabeth. All right. And now we're going to be hearing from Chuck Tamira, who is our weed risk assessor. He'll be talking about how weed risk assessments are here in Hawaii works and also talking about our plant Pono projects project, an online thing. So let me pull that up and share that.

Good morning, Chair Gabbard, Chair Chun, Members of the committees, everyone else in the room, congratulations on your 10-year anniversary. I understand the 10-year gift is aluminum, so hopefully everybody will buy you a soda or a beverage of your choice after the meeting.

As Pat said, my name is Chuck Camara. I am the weed Risk Assessment Specialist with the Hawaii Invasive Species Council, and I've been serving in that position since 2007. This morning, I'm going to be talking about two projects that I'm involved with and that are funded by HISC.

The Hawaii Pacific Weed Risk Assessment, which is mostly my Kuleana, and then the Plant Pono program, which is a whole group of people that contribute to that.

Okay, Everybody in this Committee already is aware of this, but just as a reminder to all of us, we know that islands consistently show significantly higher invasion rates compared to continental regions.

And a recent study that was just published last year showed that or two years ago showed that tropical islands in particular are vulnerable, with estimates of 20 to 30% of introduced plants becoming invasive. Because this is a plant talk, I'm going to focus on the plants. But how do we deal with invasive species in Hawaii?

There's two pronged approach that we'll use. Depending on the organism, we'll refer to those simply as the clean list versus the dirty list. The clean list side, it prohibits the introduction of any species unless it's been evaluated and approved as low risk for invasiveness. That's the guilty until proven innocent approach. And that's how we address animals.

We have to make sure an animal isn't invasive before we bring it into the state. On the flip side, the dirty list approach is allows introduction of anything unless it's on some kind of invasive species list or identified as invasive. The innocent until proven guilty approach.

And this is how we've traditionally dealt with plants on the regulatory side. So what is our dirty list in Hawaii? Well, we have two that we use. One is administered by the Department of Ag and Biosecurity. The Hawaii Noxious Weed List.

Depending on the taxonomy, it includes 75 species and 4 genera of plants that are known to cause some kind of environmental, economic harm or harm to human health. It was a valuable list at the time it was created, but as you can see in the notes there, it's a little outdated. Last updated since in 1992.

Many of the species on there are already widespread. Some of them were just accidental introductions. So it's not really as relevant to the kinds of issues we're facing today. On the federal side, they also have their own version of this dirty list, the federal noxious weed list, which includes 112 species or genera administered by USDA APHIS.

Many of these species on there are temperate plants of continental regions. So the benefits and protection they provide for continental areas wouldn't necessarily transfer to Hawaii. We're in a tropical subtropical climate and if you do the math, that's about 200 or so species that are regulated at the state or federal level.

Which means of the 342,953 or so plants that have been identified existing on Earth, it's legal to bring in more than 99% of those, no questions asked. And many smarter people than me realized this was a problem a long time ago and they tried to address it in other ways that didn't include regulation.

One of the ideas they came up with this is this tool called the Weed Risk Assessment. It's a proactive tool used to identify the risk of invasiveness in plants prior to introduction or widespread cultivation. So this phrase, weed risk assessment is recognized throughout the world, but specifically for Hawaii, the tool we use here is, was developed.

It got its origins in Australia and New Zealand. They have similar invasive species problems. So they developed this system and Hawaii decided that that might be a good idea for use here as well. So University of Hawaii botany professor evaluated different systems, modified them for use in Hawaii and decided that the Australia system was the best.

So in the late 90s, early 2000s those evaluations took place. And then in 2005, Hyst decided to fund Weed Risk Assessment as one of its annually funded projec and that went on until 2014. From 2015 to present it was folded into the HISC Core Support Program. So that's where my position is funded.

And it's remained in that under HISC administrative authority since 2015. If you're not familiar with the Weed Risk Assessment, very simply, the one we use here is a system of 49 questions about the biology, ecology, and history of invasiveness of plants elsewhere.

The way those questions get answered result in a score that places these plants into one of three risk categories. They're fairly self explainable, but lower scoring plants are rated low risk. They're considered to be relatively safe, unlikely to become invasive. Plumeria are the poster children for well behaved low risk plants in Hawaii.

On the other end of the spectrum, high risk or high scoring plants are invasive or likely to cause some kind of harm in the environment. And Miconia is a good example of a very high risk plant. And then the yellow area in the middle is. We refer to it as moderate risk or evaluate.

We might not have enough information to make an accurate risk prediction. The strengths of this tool are that it's objective and science based. As I mentioned it was, it originated as an academic project in Australia and New Zealand. So the system has been published in peer-reviewed journals and there's some standards on how you complete these assessments.

So it's repeatable. If somebody else were to complete an assessment, the results should roughly come out the same as if I did one. The results are also transparent. All the results are published and available online through a website I'll be talking about shortly. And they're reliable, relatively accurate at predicting high risk invasive plants, about 95%.

Now they're non regulatory, they're non legally binding. So I like to compare them to nutrition labels on food. You can use the weed risk assessment results to make informed planting choices, hopefully choose the low risk plants, avoid those ones that are high risk.

Just the same way you can look at a food and say should I choose the healthy option or the maybe not so healthy one? And if you're like my son, he doesn't look at the nutrition label, he'll go for the the flaming hot Cheetos and the red fingers every time.

So what has the program done in the time it's been funded? To date, we have 2,375 species that have been assessed and these results have been used by government agencies, Members of the public and industry as well as conservation groups both statewide and internationally to highlight some of the government uses that have been applied in Hawaii.

On the county level, Maui County has used weed risk assessment results in their planting plan to guide planting decisions on county properties and county funded projects. On the state level, agencies like DOFA have used these results for permitting and prioritization of targets and funding. On state administered projects.

And at the federal level, NRCS uses weed risk assessment results and projects that they fund and support throughout the island. And I mentioned it's both nationally and internationally recognized. The tool we use in Hawaii was developed in Australia and New Zealand. The same system has been tested and evaluated throughout the world. So continental us, Europe, Asia and Africa.

It's basically global. And these aren't the only weed risk assessments in use around the world, but this is the same standard one we use here. But the most use that these results in the weed risk assessment get are probably through our partners and the invasive species committees. On different islands.

Programs like BISC use weed risk assessments for target species selection, deciding which plants are going to go after. Also for early detection and rapid response. They find a new plant, they want it evaluated to see if it's something they should be worried about.

But the main way these results get transferred and communicated to the public is through this Plant Pono website, which is a place where information about the invasiveness of plants is published. All the low-risk plants, all the high-risk plants, as well as native plants on this website.

And people can, you know, search it by common name, scientific name, find out whether or not their favorite plant could cause problems if they were to plant it in their area. And if there's not an assessment on there, that's where I come in.

You can always send me a request and I can get an assessment done pretty quickly. How does Plant Pono get transferred to the public other than this website? And I should mention that these next slides were all provided by staff at the Big Island Invasive Species Committee.

So shout out to Frannie Brewer, Molly Murphy, Kavehy Young and Darcy Yogi. They provided these excellent data and graphics. They're trying to control demand of invasive species on the supply and the demand. So on the supply side, they approached nurseries to try to convince them not to grow invasives. And on the demand side, they approached the public.

And in a 2017 survey they conducted, they found that 95% of the public would not buy a plant if they knew it was invasive. So they're receptive to the message. They just need somebody to tell them, you know, what they should and shouldn't buy.

Going back to that supply side, there's a Plant Pono endorsement program where nurseries that get endorsed by the system agree to follow best management practices to prevent the spread of pests like little fire ants and Koki frogs and their planting materials.

They also use weed risk assessment results before importing new species in case they could become invasive in Hawaii. And they've agreed to not sell certain invasive plants on no grow list. And here's like a murderous row of some of the worst invasives that many of these nurseries have agreed to stop selling.

These are well known invasive species, all high risk in the weed risk assessment. And many of these nurseries have said, yeah, we don't want to cause any more problems, we'll stop selling them.

On that demand side, the public, we try to convince people to choose a low risk, non native plant or a native plant when and avoid an invasive species when there's, you know, other options. And how is that done? Through lots and lots of outreach.

Just like Elizabeth Spieth mentioned in her presentation, all the ISCs do tons of outreach in their communities. These are Big island data, but these could easily apply to other islands as well. BIISC puts on lots of public outreach events like native plant nursery workshops, wreath making workshops, native sea ball workshops, data from 2024.

So they reach 1200 people in these events. They're always really popular, well attended by the public. They produce colorful brochures, planting guides depending on the region you live in. So coastal, high elevation, wet, dry. Again, trying to steer people to choosing a native plant, a low risk, non native plant that's right for their area.

And these are all downloadable from the Plant Pona website. Back to the website. Popularity in it has dramatically increased, especially since the Plant Pono outreach has ramped up from between 2021 and 2025. You know, website visits have almost quintupled and average monthly use has gone from 2,300 to 8,000.

So again, there's a hunger and an interest in the public to use this material we're providing. BIISC has achieved a lot of success as well. They've also gotten nurseries to agree to completely phase out for invasive plants that are very popular in the trade. So these are plants that would make them money.

And they said, like, we don't want to contribute to the problem anymore. So they do have success in convincing nurseries. Here's enough more data from Big Island nurseries that were part of this program. In 201723 nurseries were selling invasive species. By 2024, that dropped to eight.

So they are having lots of positive, measurable effects through their efforts. In spite of all this outreach though, this is back to we still could use some help on the regulatory side or maybe, you know, we've gotten all these carrots now maybe we need a little bit more stick.

Here's an example of Australian tree fern that was noticed as for sale in one of our nurseries on Big Island. In 2024, they were approached by BIISC, asked them if they would discontinue the sale.

And when they found it, when this nursery found out that it wasn't illegal to sell Australian tree ferns, they said not we're going to keep selling. So, you know, maybe they could use a little bit more convincing than just pretty please.

Just to emphasize that point again, this was another study that was just published last year or no, this year, very recent. This is from New Zealand, but it could easily apply to Hawaii. They showed that non native species that are less costly to propagate and market and are sold more cheaply are more likely to naturalize or spread.

What that translates to is cheaper plants equals more sales, more in the environment. And it's more likely that those are the plants that are going to escape and possibly become invasive. So this is possibly another way to apply some regulatory pressure.

If we're not going to ban certain invasive species, maybe there could be a surcharge or something on some of those that are identified as most highly potentially to be invasive, high risk plants. And that's just another possibility. And to add, here's our holy grail or our wish list of things we'd like to see.

It would be great if we could update or modernize our noxious weed rules or have some new regulations in place to address invasive plants that reflect current conditions. In Hawaii, I throw this restricted plant rules in to protect keystone plant species. There's a former supervisor of mine, this was his, his wish.

Just the way we used to protect like important agricultural crops like sugar cane and pineapple. You know, perhaps there's like a way we could protect some of our keystone native species like hokia Koa Mamani, other things that are foundational to our ecosystems.

And lastly, moving away from that dirty list approach to a more clean list so that guilty until proven innocent. And with that, I just want to thank all of our colleagues and staff and partners in the various agencies. Special shout out to Pat here and his staff, cgaps, Christy Martin and the Hau' Oli Maloa Foundation.

She was kind of like the brainchild behind Plant Pono and got the initial funding to get it started again. Highlight all the great people at BIISC and the other ISCs that do all the outreach. I'm just the guy sitting at a computer. They're the people going out and talking to the public.

Tam Penniman, my supervisor and I also wanted to shout out our tech guys who designed this really fancy database. We used to enter all the weed risk assessment results and also have developed the 643 pest hotline system that Beth will be talking about. So with that, thank you very much.

All right, thanks so much, Chuck. So that's the weed risk assessment in Plant Pono and it's a very important part of the work of the HISC. And now we're going to turn it over to another kind of website. It's Our Pest Hotline, 643Pest. There's both a phone side and a website.

And the website is covered by the Hawaiian Invasive species [email protected]. But I'll let Elizabeth Spieth take over.

Once again, it looks like I'm able to connect again. Hopefully somebody please speak out if I'm not being heard or this isn't visible that well, but aloha again. I once again, I'm Elizabeth Spieth.

One of the things that I one of my primary jobs and what I do with the HISC is helping manage part of the online pest hotline 643 Pest.org of which the logo you see here I am hoping is very familiar to you.

Today we're going to be sharing a little bit about the history of the pest hotlines and then going under the hood a little bit to talk about how that works, how these pest reports get processed. Then I'm going to roll out and share with you a little bit about fiscal year.

The last fiscal year is information or data or stats. But I'll do that through sharing our dashboards. We have a dashboard that has a general overview of what's being reported and what's happening with those reports as well as we're rolling out today, Dun, Dun, Dun. A new dashboard that I can't wait.

To share with you that gets us a little bit of a deeper look into individual species and how they're being reported over time and by island. So with that. Let'S start with that. Let me move this over. I'm sorry. Let's start with that kind of overview of over time of the pest hotline.

And some of this I'm hoping will elucidate a little bit about how the pest hotline works for most people without.

You don't need to know all of this stuff going on in the background, the history, how it's being reported, because the overall impact is that we want it to be easy for community to report pests and know that those reports are going somewhere, being processed and people are being heard.

But this is important context to kind of see that evolution of how our pest hotline systems have evolved over time to meet growing needs and technologies. We're going to step right back all the way to the early 90s when the State Department of Agriculture launched the 586 Pest Hotline.

That was to support early detection and to have one place that people could call to report invasive species. It was based at H2A in Oahu at that time, some of you may or may not remember if there was a phone number on Oahu that people were calling from neighbor islands that actually was long distance.

So while we were creating a pest hotline, it still was not necessarily accessible and usable by everybody throughout the state. Then in 2005 an online reporting platform was developed by the United States Geological Survey USGS and funded by the Hawaiian Vaser Species Council.

The goal for this was to expand that access statewide for reporting and strengthen how pest reports could be screened, routed and tracked. The system was created as a tool that could supplement that phone hotline and it actually was created to be made available to the Department of Agriculture to use.

It was called Report a Pest.org at that time and over time it was managed by the United States Geological Survey, then the University of Hawaii and eventually by HISC. This is actually when I step into the picture was a little before that 2005.

I was one of the staff that was involved with helping develop and launch that original online pest hotline. Then, in 2006, there was the launch of 643 Pest. This is a toll-free phone hotline managed by the Department of Agriculture. That was not long distance for people to call. So you could call from anywhere.

If you were calling, it's kind of like Pizza Hut. If you were calling from an island like say on Hawaii island, you would make that phone call. You would be automatically directed to a local Department of Agriculture office in which plant quarantine inspectors would able to answer those reports. Moving a little bit more ahead.

So we've got this report a Pest. We've got 643 Pest that's working for the whole state. And you notice that's kind of is that simple for people to understand. No.

So in 2015 there was a rebranding so that the online pest hotline is 643pest.pest to match the phone hotline to be able to create a unified, user-friendly place for people to report invasive species. The goal is simple: to make it as easy as possible for people to find the right place to report.

Then in 2017 the council and then. The Governor formally adopted 643pest and 643pest.org as the official state pest hotline. So looking a little bit too.

So that brings us up to date and looking a little bit to the future as you've been hearing about under Act 236, when his transitions to the management of the Department to DAB, this kind of sets a statutory deadline that could really prove positive in letting us move forward to even more unify this whole kind of test hotline ecosystem.

Now from our perspective, it's not just a technical challenge, it's a planning challenge. Because each hotline is supported by people with deep specialized expertise. And our successful integration means that we need to work together to support elements of both systems, those strong elements of both systems.

And across all of these changes, I wanted to point out one principle has stayed constant, but one that people need a single trusted place to report invasive species. Make it simple.

But also, since 2005, we've really worked hard to ensure that there is transparency, coordination and community empowerment that's really powering these hotlines and the early detection of invasive species statewide.

From here on out in the presentation, I will be speaking focus on the online643pest.org, which is managed by HISC and not specifically speak to the phone part of the hotline.

But I do want to, as we go into how these reports are processed and go into those dashboards, I do want to emphasize that we all are in constant communication together.

We are all working together to ensure that people are heard, reports don't go into a black hole, and that we are processing people's reports so that we can ensure that we're supporting early detection as well as providing that support. That people need when they're reporting invasive species.

So here's a little bit how on the online, how we go into reporting, processing all reports, just to clarify that every report that comes in to the online reporting is reviewed by a real person, and that's intentional. Most reports do not have adequate information to be able to automatically know what they're reporting.

Many reports are incomplete or misidentified. So we start with following up with the reporter to clarify about location, getting more photos, finding out what they're seeing. And consulting specialists on the way to verify the ID of what people are reporting. The majority of reports actually go down here. They're actually going to be resolved directly.

With the community by providing that identification of what they found as well as vetted management resources. But when something is unusual or high priority, it is quickly sent and routed to the appropriate responding agency whenever possible. And this was from the beginning, one of our vision is we really wanted to close that loop so that people.

Felt heard and supported. Whenever possible, we follow up with the original reporter so they know what is what happened and closing kind of the loop on the report. So this whole process is created to build trust, improves reporting quality, and reduces unnecessary workload for workload for our partners.

As I mentioned, with the online pest hotline that's going directly to plant quarantine inspectors, those are the same people who are charged with inspecting all goods coming in, going between islands. So whenever possible, when we can do.

That initial information gathering, we can filter out like those what we call the cockroach reports, you know, literally reports of, you know, a roach in a backyard. Not infestation or crazy amount whenever possible. That helps reduce that workload for them. And still the community feels heard.

So just to show you, I'll go really briefly through a couple of examples of what that actually looks like. These are all pulled for from real reports in the last couple of weeks. So here is something we got this picture of this thing that was suspected to be a coconut rhinoceros beetle larva on Maui. Big deal.

Maui Nui. No known coconut rhinoceros beetle. So the first step, believe it or not, this is the way a lot of the pictures look. You probably believe it. We cannot identify that from the image that was submitted.

So we have to first follow up with the reporter via Email, text and phone to get better pictures, potentially consult with others and ground staff to be able to visit and pick up a specimen and work towards being able to determine whether this is coconut rhinoceros beetle or one of the really common look alikes oriental flower beetle.

So if it's not coconut rhinoceros beetle, the643Pass.org report facilitators can now provide management guidance about oriental flower beetle as well as because we have this kind of opportunity, somebody's actually reached out to us and is interested and engaged about an invasive species. It is an incredibly important and opportune time to then share coconut rhinoceros beetle prevention information.

So we're getting directing that information about how to prevent and stop CRB spread to the people that are interested. If this were to be CRB that would immediately trigger a state and county response that involves all sorts of people.

Once again we trying to close the loop all the time so that people know what are happening, they feel heard. Now if there is a coconut rhinoceros beetle reported on Oahu, that actually looks very different.

As you all know, unfortunately as over the past 10 plus years CRB has been spreading out Oahu, there is not one single agency with the capacity to go out after every single report and take action in somebody's yard, at a business, etc. But that does not make these reports any less important.

On Oahu we get, we focus on so this is what we got somebody sent in a little CRB with a hot wheel for scale, but we were able to identify yes, it's a coconut rhinoceros beetle.

So at this point what we do for everybody reporting them is we really focus on high quality management guidance connecting people to support through uh, CTAHR CRB response program and other trusted sources for guidance on how to deal with CRB infestations. It's super important that it's always accurate, consistent information.

When CRB reports on Oahu increased by over 6,700% between 2020 and 2023, in just a moment, I'll show you kind of what that looks like in numbers. So this huge up uptick in reports were coming in as CRB was spreading. People were seeing the damage and becoming more and more aware of it.

But during that period, our 643Pest Org team expanded our capacity of report facilitators to ensure that every single person reporting CRB on Oahu still received a response. And to my knowledge, to our knowledge, we were the only group able to keep up with that volume of community wide reporting.

Because the volume just went up so much, it was very hard to talk with every single person. So we also verify record CRB reports in our database and our system that Chuck kind of talked about.

We have a specialized database to help record all of our facilitation Administration and track how we're sending reports that are important to other groups. So we can create a record that response partners can use to see reporting patterns over time. And I'll show you that with the dashboard.

That also means that if new funding, new technologies or increased response capacity become available, we already have a data set of verified, verified sites and people to contact. And one last thing here I wanted to point out.

This approach also aligns with the Coconut Rhinoceros beetles statewide communications plan which HISC helped develop along with the CRB response and a hui of people that put in a lot of time partners across the state. This plan recognizes that CRB response looks different on each island depending on infestation level, agency capacity and community context.

So that's really important to help that we're all saying the same thing and that messaging resources and expectations stay aligned. We are actually working CRB response with support from HISC and that whole hui that helped create this are working to update this because things are changing.

So we want to make sure that our communications across the state are changing along with it. I'll be super quick with this one. But another thing that's talked about a lot, this is for ant reports. So we hear about people talking about little fire ants. So what does that look like? Somebody reports a little fire ant.

This is another one where human review is essential. Reports coming in. This is one that we got from the North Shore on Oahu. And this is what it looks like. Somebody says they were stung by an ant.

You get kind of a picture and believe it or not, we cannot even the experts ID what that is from that picture. Hawaii has more than 60 ant species, many of which look nearly identical and they actually need a microscope in order to do an identification.

So what we do is we ask the person to send in every person reporting an ant. We ask them to collect a specimen, to send this into a specialist be identified. In this case that would be Oahu Invasive Species Committee or DAB. And you can see the list of places that's on stoptheant.org under reporting.

You can see where people can send in ants for verification. But in this case it'd be OISC or DAB.

And that way that we can get it identified and figured out what it is, rule out the look alikes, find where there's little fire ant and be able to detect potentially new high risk species like the red imported fire ant. If you look down one of the more common ants that people run into.

If you've ever been to Ala Moana Park, Magic island, many of our parks across the islands, you may have been stung or swarmed by ants on your feet. Often those will be tropical fire ants which have been widespread across the whole state for over 100 years.

They're fairly common and they are not something that necessarily agencies go out and respond to. It would be more the Kuleana of the state or the park or the resident or the state park, county park or the resident to take care of those pest ants in their yard.

They happen to look though identical to the red imported fire ant which is from the naked eye which is a really high risk species. So it's really important that we encourage. Everyone to send in ants. But what would happen is we find out that antenna, it's tropical fire ant we provide high-quality management resources.

We also have this recorded in the database so that in the future if things change, we can always go back and look at all of those reports here. As I said, I just wanted to show just a snapshot in time of the big picture.

In the last fiscal year we had a little over 1,500 pest reports statewide covering over 120 species. This graph at the top right shows the number of reports increasing over time.

And here's where that thing I was talking about where there was just a crazy amount of interest in reporting CRB as well as some spread the spread of CRB across Oahu. But you can see that spike I was telling you about half of all of those reports, those over 1500 in the past year were community resolved.

So those are the ones where we provided that high quality information. One third were forwarded to agencies for other actions and some of them were the ID was not possible.

So just for you guys and to kind of wrap this up, but I really do want to show you this really great dashboard that we just unveiled in the last week. I wanted to highlight that we have had. We now have two dashboards.

One is a high level one that gives kind of a general overview of what I just showed you. It allows you to look through the reports, see how many are reported and see where people are reporting them. You can go to 643pest.org, go to the data dashboard, look at general insights.

It'll be a little bit of a different color if you use that on your phone, but you can see all of that yourself as well as as I mentioned, that new species insights in which we were able to take of that 20 years of reporting history.

We can take all of those reports and start to look at trends over time for those top 20 reported species. And I think it's very interesting to look at how that changes over time what people are reporting. This one doesn't really work on your phone. You really kind of need a tablet or a computer to see that.

But I'd like to if that is okay and if I configure make this seamless switch. I actually wanted to show you really quickly what that looks like, these dashboards, that species dashboard. So let me see. Can you guys see my screen? Okay, so as I mentioned and you can follow along on this.

I won't really go over this general insights but this has been up for about five years. You can go, this is live data. I have it right now looking at the fiscal year. So this is pretty much the same information I just told you about.

All of the information that's shown here is over time, it gives you, you know, whatever shows trends over the year, what islands, where we at with report processing, what types of things people are reporting. You can come down too and see. Like hey, here's the top species that people.

This is what people care about and what they're reporting out there as well as by island. And there's like a general map that just shows you people are sending in these reports from all over the place. Mostly where people live, work and play but it covers most of the whole paina.

But this one, this is our new one. I'm really excited because this gives you a little bit more depth and understanding. Now, once again, I want to emphasize this is pest reporting that has been verified or vetted by our pest report facilitators. So that live data over 20 years. It is not the same as the.

Distribution of where these organisms are. So by looking at this, the first one that comes up, this number one reported species, coconut rhinoceros beetle. This does not show you all of the places where they are, but as you go down so it shows you the big picture what's going on with reports right now.

But you can come down and start looking at maps of over time, where are the hotspots of where people are reporting. So as we do this, you can kind of zoom out and see there's. A lot of reporting on Kauai here in these areas.

There's some hot spots on Oahu just happens to be close to where CRB was first detected, but shows a lot of spread. Oops, sorry. Let me zoom in. But you also can look at spread over time. We have this little toolbar. So there's a heat map. You can also look at markers. This data has been somewhat.

You can't pin down to exact locations. To provide some privacy for when things are reported we by somebody else. We don't necessarily want to show exact locations. So this is blurred. You can kind of see General areas. But there's markers that are grouped. There's a heat map. But then we also can look at spread over time.

And this zooms out to the state. Level so that you can see when. Species reports, especially with CRB, jump from Oahu to somewhere else. But I'm actually going to zoom in to kind of show you a little bit of how this looks.

You kind of zoom over time and you can see how these reports like start popping up. Oh, there's a few in the North Shore. Oh, look. You know, and it is very interesting to see people's awareness and the spread of these species over time.

If you zoom out over time, you can start to also see when we started getting reports from new islands and first popped over to Kauai. Then we start seeing in the Kona. Area and on Big Island. So you can see these are all of the places where we have verified reports of coconut rhinoceros beetle.

There's a couple more graphs if you're into graphic representations. But this is just another way, like I said, to provide transparency and trend tracking on what's happening with this pest reporting. We have this data, so this is another way for us to share this with everyone. We also have, I said the top 20 here is Koki.

It immediately went over to the place we had the most reports. But I'm pointing this out because when we zoom out and look at the state, you don't see as many reports on Big island on Hawaii. And that isn't because there's fewer Ki. There on Hawaii Island. It's because people are not reporting them on Hawaii Island.

They are more used to Koki. They don't feel the need to report it in. But once again, we can see some interesting trends when you look across the the state once again can do that spread over time. And it's I just find it really interesting. I'm very excited to share it with you guys.

And with that I'm going to stop sharing. And mahalo for letting me give you this kind of behind the scenes on the pest hotline, sharing that with all of you guys.

Great. Thanks so much, Elizabeth. Okay, and now for our final presentation, I'll bring up Mason Russo, who is our Research and Projects coordinator. He'll be talking about the Port of Entry Exit Test Monitoring program. So let me set that up.

Thank you, Patrick. And thank you, Chair Gabbard. Thank you, Chairman. And thank you everybody for being here today to listen to this HISC presentation.

So today we're going to be talking about the Port of Entry Monitoring Program, which is one of these last programs we'd like to see continue indefinitely because it's a lot of benefits for the state. So who here is familiar with the portaventure Monitoring program? I'm just curious. I'm seeing some hands. That's excellent or hand.

So this is an interagency collaboration that involves Hawaii Department of Transportation, Hawaii Department of Health, Hawaii Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity, University of Hawaii and HISC, which is right now administered through DLNR. And it really does take all these interagency teams with their individual expertise to run the statewide biosecurity Early Detection Rapid Response program.

So what does this program look for? This program currently supplements potential biosecurity gaps in the state. So right now, SBP, Customs Border Protection, USDA-, APHIS and HDAB are the main agencies that oversee biosecurity and look at different pathways of entry for high risk species through different commodities.

However, the species on this list have a pathway of sneaking into the state that could potentially bypass these regulatory agency inspections. So for example, invasive ants can be spread at ports of entry. We don't have the red imported fire ant yet, which could cause over 200 million a year to the state and economic losses.

We're well familiar with CRB. And we'll get into later how this program helped detect the first detection in Kona Africanized bees. Anybody from Hawaii island knows we have an excellent queen bee industry. And if we were to get Africanized genetics in the Hawaii Islands, that industry would probably collapse.

Mosquitoes, we know what happens when we underfund public health. We get dengue and other diseases. So we really need to be monitoring our ports of entry for mosquitoes and new species in the Hawaiian Islands. And Japanese beetle can impact many, many plants, and we don't want that getting into the state.

So currently we have monitoring at our ports of entry. We expanded the Harbors in 2022. We look at major airports and harbors for these different species through monitoring in various ways within this interagency collaboration. So I'm gonna go quickly just to the program accomplishments.

Within 2025, we deployed 15,000 vials for ant monitoring across the state with no notable interceptions that were, which is excellent. And invasive species monitoring. Nothing means we're doing our job right and it's good. But when we get something, that means we have to respond right away.

So even if there isn't something being found the entire time, there is value to that. And an economic analysis of this program by my predecessor, Dr. Layla Kaufman, indicated about every $1 put into this program yields $100 output return for the State of Hawaii. Now, we had 66 Japanese beetle traps deployed with no detections.

We did have 19 swarms of bees detected in our reports, but through genetic testing and behavioral analyses, none of them were Africanized, which is great news. DoH helped surveillance 17,000 mosquitoes with no new species introductions of concern at our ports of entry, which is a really excellent statistic.

Now, through our CRB traps in Kona, which were there about seven years, we did detect the first beetle in Kona in March 3rd of this year, which shows how this program can be at the forefront of early detection and rapid response.

And with that, we do have teams at every port of entry monitoring thousands of palm trees for the characteristic signs who were trained to really monitor that first round of bee cuts when they're feeding. So I'm just going to get into that Kona rapid response just to kind of highlight when nothing happens. This is good.

When we're not finding new species of ants, that's also great. But when we do find something, what do we do? How does this work? So day one, rapid response. I was in Kona with BIISC, and we found a coconut rhinoceros beetle in a trap.

So right away we had a MOU agreement from Maui that wasn't officially signed, but we had a playbook. So we contacted HDAB, we contacted CRB response to we began going to delimit the perimeter properties to figure out where could this have come from.

And this is a dashboard that's publicly available by the Big Island Invasive Species Council that's zoomed in right now. It shows current trapping adult and larval catches in Hawaii Island. This is available online to the public and you can see here that we have an expanded contained population with increased trapping and larval detection.

And with this we had a voluntary stop movement. So the beetle was found March 3. A voluntary stop order was signed on June 27 and this voluntary movement was extended one more time, September, that expires the 29th of this month, I believe, or 31st.

And we would like to see an interim rule pass to really lock down on these areas as the next slide is going to show, or it's not after that anyway, we're going to go back to that in a sec. But we are finding larvae in an area where we want to really implement more regulation.

So with this rapid response, we'd excellent trapping from the Big Island Invasive Species Committee and we had really fast rapid response by our partners at HDAB. They were driving from Hilo and just knocking out thousands of trees in this zone.

And that's the way you kill CRB, you set up trapping, you treat the main zone and you mitigate green waste and that's how you decrease the infestation. So we had a highly effective rapid response in the early stages with this, as you can see with 263,034 trees last year. And this is where interagency comes in.

So we have these piles of greenways that are bigger than this room and with a shovel I can't get too far. But with Dexter DOT, who will give us with DOT funded excavator crew, we're able to.

We were seeing adults who couldn't find larvae and within one 3 day trip in Kona, we found the first large breeding site in the Agriculture park. And this led to a multi agency operation with all the partners, HDOT, BIISC, HDOH and HDOT and the county all came together once we found these larvae.

And with this we were able to fumigate this in a very rapid fashion. And as Parwinder indicated over here, that failure is not an option. Interagency effort is underway after these were discovered. So we all need to work together and this is basically the main aspect of interagency collaboration.

And rapid response in the state and why we need all of us with their capacities to work together. I do want to show some pictures of this operation so you can see that tarp looks much bigger in person when you're standing on top of the mound and only two of us are moving it.

And you can see we're also training detector dogs on the larval find on Big island to train them to that scent because there was a slightly different scent for CRB and Kona than there was for CRB on Oahu, which now the dogs are trained onto that with this while all this was ongoing and BIISC was doing an excellent job of trapping, there's a lot of public outreach.

This is just a small portion of their statistics. So CRB in Hawaii island you've had almost 10,000 people reach through outreach events and lots of community engagement.

And this is how we build an effective rapid response early port detection to widespread MOU oriented response plans that are available at hour zero, then the community response moving forward from there. So in the end we had some amazing accomplishments with this and it still is ongoing.

So we have HDOT, CRB response, HDAB, BIISC, HDOH, county and HISC along with many other groups such as CGAPS, but this is the core group that's involved in the biweekly discussions.

We have probably more than 483 traps since this PowerPoint was made and more than 2,634 trees treated and thanks to county and HDOT, 840 tons of green waste takes a lot of lot of trucks, a lot of coordination, a lot of fumigation, a lot of scientific rigor to make sure we're doing this properly and following best BMPs with this process.

And this doesn't happen just casually. We do have bi weekly meetings with all these agencies bringing in specialists on a frequent basis and this is just what needs to be done and what has been continuing to happen since March. With this response I wanted to continue with just a quick note on Act 236.

So this POEM program is received funding through Act 236 and we hope to see this funding continue for the long term and keep this program in there along with the addition of new target pests as the Resource working group.

Besides with the PALM program right now we just finished our 2026-2030 strategic planning which had 46 partners from across different agencies statewide involved in that and that plan will be available online in the next few weeks.

Hopefully with this I wanted to talk a Little bit about research related to these pests in Act 236 because part of my role is also research and projects coordinator. When I was at UH, we were always grateful for funding from the state. So it's good to see that we're able to support state-funded projects.

We're going to focus today on the project research requests which we had 39 projects and 4.75 million. And you can see that between the 36 projects of BioControl and project requests, we were not able to give them the full amount that was requested. We were able to fund exciting projects. Not going to get to all of them.

Some of you were at the last meeting. But these are the ones related to high priority pests I want you all to become aware of that are currently going to be underway once Act 236 funds are sent out on the university faculty.

Get working on this for LFA we have new optimized bait studies underway just to really modernize and expand the tools available for LFA including maybe some organic compounds with efficacy of treatments being done and also RNAi interferon interference.

For LFA which is a partner program also happening with RIFA in Brisbane right now for Coqui we funded four proposals. One was passive acoustic monitoring, another is to explore acoustic deterrence.

Another is to explore acoustic disruption and island wide control with this R and D. And then finally there is a variety of IPM style strategies are being proposed by these teams. So we have lots of different specialists from around the state and country on these projects.

Important my role was to identify and build connections with these researchers and push them to conduct research that can benefit the state of Hawaii. And finally for CRB we do have more proposals. As this pest is gaining traction, we're going to keep pushing it back. So we have volatile compound canine detection.

How do we improve canine smelling the beetle? We have new devices and practices for CRB. We have these large scale traps which really could be that each community could have their own dumpster with these special modifications to pull beetles out of their communities.

Which could be a proposal from this we have drone mounted detection, novel pulse technology and also EDNA for early detection, rapid response. And finally one extra program is going to be a port proposal which might have a device which can be machine learned for vibrational feeding at hour one.

And if that can be used, we want to get that in Maui County asap. So this is where we're at with CRB with research. And I want to thank you all for your time today to listen about the Port of Entry monitoring program. And I'd like to pass this back to Patrick Chee.

Thank you so much, Mason. All right, well, that's, That's where we're at. So. Thank you very much everyone for joining us for our variety of deep dives into the important programs of the Hawaii Invasive Species Council.

As I mentioned, we did have this submittal with suggestions, recommendations about what we would hope that the Legislature might consider this year.

And of course, our big concern at this point or looking forward to the potential transition from being administered at Department of Land and Natural Resources transitioning to the Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity that we maintain these programs that we talked about today and the staff that comes with them in order for them to continue doing the good work that they're doing.

So I at this point open it up for questions and hope you folks if you have of course, any questions after today, you can also reach me at where my business card is. Any questions from Legislatures.

Thank you very much for your presentation, Patrick, and for everyone for being here. So open up for questions. We're going to alternate between House and Senate, so I'll start with House Members. Any Members with a question. I have a very simple question. Sure. So the engagement was a big part. Love seeing what you do.

So my first question is do we want to push people towards calling 643passport or to the website? What is more beneficial for you guys?

Well, the Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity largely manages the phone hotline, but Hawaii Invasive Species Council manages the643test.org both of them are good, but we think that whatever mode gets them to report something is important.

And then my follow up to that is do you does PISK have graphics things that we can be sending out in our e newsletters on our social media to make sure we can continue that public engagement. Again, you guys have done a really good job.

Both of my kids can very quickly identify pretty much everything you've put up there and I've told the story many times. My daughter even got a coconut rhinoceros beetle tattoo that she proudly it was life size too that she proudly wore on her leg. So she can identify. So that has been great.

But the more information we can push out if you are able to send that, I think to the Legislature. We all send out newsletters and things all the time. Would love those resources to help you our efforts.

Absolutely. We'll definitely work trying to. And of course the various invasive species committees also have their own outreach materials, etc. But we definitely have some that we can share on a regular basis.

The more you can send, the better in my mind.

All right, thanks

Senator Richard.

Yeah, thank you. Really appreciate the information. One of the things I've been concerned about over time is that this is multi agency and classically when you're multi agency, coordination is really difficult. But it's been my experience that it seems to be working pretty well as we go through this transition. What is your biggest fear?

Oh, goodness. Just so you folks know, I've just been on the job.

I know that. That's why I'm asking you. That's a hot seat you're sitting in.

Yes, yes. Well, I think my biggest fear in this transition is that my position will stay with the Hawaiian Invasive Species Council. Well, doesn't stay with the Hawaiian Basin. It stays with Division of Forest and Wildlife. And so in that transition, hopefully there will be carryover and will hopefully get that information to move at the very least.

But I think that of course, everyone has good intentions and we're working with everyone in the HISC and we hope that it moves well. But I have a feeling that there will be some loss of continuity and there may be some potential for new invasive species to come and find their way through the cracks in our system.

But nonetheless, we will do our best to try and keep that continuity and work with the Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity in this transition to make it as smooth as possible.

Again, it's interagency collaboration, cooperation, communication. And I think that last one communication part might get lost because been here long enough where I've seen invasive species come in. Everybody knew so it was going to be invasive, but nothing happened until it was rampant.

Like the, that thing took off and we all knew it was going to do it, but there was no response. I think part of it was because we didn't have interagency communication. And remember years ago at the time, the statement was, well, it's not a problem yet, so we won't respond until it's a problem. I mean, that. That's a dumb answer.

Unfortunately, you know, a lot of an invasion of an invasive species often will stay at a very low level for, for a while and then at a certain point take off. And so we want to, of course, get it before it does that ideally.

So I think a lot of that is communication as well as working with our partners who have the capacity. A lot of times it's somebody or some organization or some sort of report comes in and then it's a matter of scrambling and saying who has the ability to deal with it right now?

And so oftentimes, it's a question of how do we manage the resources that we have that are people and time that is somewhat limited, but we do what we can.

And I'll just follow. One of the things I am concerned about is jurisdiction and jurisdictional responsibility, as we kind of have multi agency of who can do what and how quickly we can respond, because we've seen successes, and I've been looking at your websites.

I assume we have the funding in place to keep these things up and running. But I'm concerned as we go through this transition, we're going to lose some of this, and we may hit some stutter steps that we seem to have clarified already. So that's my concern. Chair, thank you.

Thanks again for coming out today and you have great staff. I always respect people who can have a stream of information without ever saying or thinking about it. So hats off to both the gentlemen there. A lot of the stuff I feel like that we're talking about and thank you as well.

Online is yesterday's news and things like QLB aren't even on the list and to Tim's point is there often and I know you can't help things that happened in the past, but how.

And I see on some of the research lists here like RNA based herbicides for landscape scale control of invasive plants and I know like, I feel like biocontrol is one of those areas that's been been under emphasized for quite a while. The feds have been really shoring us up.

I know CTAHR is looking at a program and so is Department of Ag Biosecurity. Any input or any. Can you guys provide anything on that, on the HIC side, on the biocontrol side that your efforts go towards fulfilling that role. Biocontrol.

The things that are in our borders already, the things that are here that are widespread, I mean I feel like a lot of these insects we're still chasing with the hope and pray model, but they're here and they're bugs. They're pretty hard. Like even if it is an inch and a half beetle, it's pretty.

Well, I mean definitely we're, I mean thank you to the Legislature for putting significantly more money into the invasive species system and some of that is going towards potentially getting more biosecurity, more biocontrol agent essentially testing facilities up and running because that has been one of the limiting steps as far as getting biocontrol agents into this, into this state and being able to test them in a safe environment.

So that is an ongoing thing. I don't know if Mason can probably.

Talk to that also with your QLB question. The vibrational frequency port device also has a small pilot project to learn the frequency of QLB feeding for early detection rapid response in this upcoming port of entry monitoring program funded proposal.

So that'll be monitoring for red palm weevil, which it's already trained for and being trained for machine learning for CRB and QLB. As for biocontrol exploration, we have a few HISC funded projects that will be happening this year through Act 236. There's one for the HALA scale and the Lobate LAC scale.

We know the HALA scale is partially responsible for reducing pandanus forests across the Hawaiian Islands and low bait lack scale is a widespread insect impacting many native plants. There was also two line spittlebug funded in that proposal along with the proposal is only partially funded Potential to look at this one parasite of the coffee berry borer.

That's one of the best out there but the most difficult to mass produce. And that's just one of the three biocontrol proposals. I am trying to remember the other two but they were for invasive plants as well. I know we are in later stages of approval where there are biocontrol agents that are ready to be imported.

I believe like the Miconia butterfly is one of them for example. And we just need I think the last step of that approval for that to be brought in. But there's been a lot of a lot of exciting news coming up with upcoming hopefully biocontrol facilities and biocontrol research.

And that's definitely one of the best tools we have for our insects in Hawaii implants.

Sure. And I know you guys aren't doing the biocontrol specifically yourselves, but is your role more. I mean do you have a role in that in like the field. What's the word I'm looking for?

Follow up basically or I mean definitely as the strategic funders for these projects it helps guide the types of. So the funding flows through HISC. There's a number of projects, some of them that were listed on the back.

There also if you don't mind. So I do communicate with one of the researchers specifically with funded project. Part of my dissertation work was to do biological control exploration. So I have some contacts in those countries that I've been sharing and kind of giving advice for this next stage of exploration.

And between Cavi, Tracy Johnson and Mark Wright and the other biocontrol scientists, they're definitely all talking. And I know Dr. Melzer's lab has been importing different strains of the CRB biocontrol, but that's not a hisp funded project.

Cool. Gotcha. Glad to hear it. Thank you so much. Yield. I got a question Pat for Chuck.

Chuck. The Hawaii Reed risk assessment and the plant Pono that was mentioned are currently voluntary for people to use. And so how do you see it as far as being integrated into regulation in the future?

Well, I would think that because so many important plants could be rated high risk, they're well known for being invasive. We don't want to use weed risk assessment results alone to make that decision. I think it would be a partnership between people on the academic side. The Conservation side, the biosecurity side as well as the industry side.

To it's essentially like a Committee that would do like a cost benefit analysis and weigh the cost of this invasive species versus the benefits of some kind of restriction. There's a really good example of that. One of my favorite beverages is rated high risk by the weed risk assessment coffee.

And nobody, no sane person on this planet would decide to use weed risk assessment results to restrict the planting of coffee. But there is some benefit to know those risks because the commercial coffee growers recognize wild coffee, which is highly invasive.

There's many places you go to in Hawaii and there's like dense thickets of coffee stands that look just like any other invasive plant. Those wild plants can harbor pests and pathogens that impact the commercial coffee growers and increase their costs.

So controlling those in a context type basis could provide economic benefits as well as ecological benefits by doing some kind of management. But weed risk assessment, I'll be the first person to say they should not be used alone without others consultation by both industry and expertise on the conservation and biosecurity side. Long winded answer.

At the same time though, I think that the weed risk assessment could be one factor in potentially adding new weeds to the noxious weed list. It still hasn't been updated since 1992.

But I think that that definitely these kinds of risk assessments could be potentially a way for the Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity to update those in the future.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair. Thank you for your conversations today. I kind of had a question on the responses to coconut, rhinoceros beetle and the interagency work happening in Kona. I think it's great. I wanted to open up kind of county requests or community requests related to, you know, green waste management.

And if there have been recommendations from HISC and then if there are allowances for other departments to respond if they want to, what some of the other strategies are related to green waste management? Because that's really going to be the critical component. Right.

And do we have all the regulatory framework best put forward in that area of tools for CRP response?

I would ask Mason to respond to that.

I know you guys have spent hours working on hours and hours every week talking through it. So if there are some strategies that are regulatory that we that may be proposals to the Legislature based on those interagency conversations, it would be interesting to hear some of those.

Yeah, of course. So one of the biggest challenges is green waste and there is a variety of types of green waste managed and Unmanaged. So unmanaged could be illegal dumping of material on property. Whether it's state or public that is unmanaged. And gathering which can accumulate CRB while managed is typically mulch and other sold type green waste.

That has to be up to certain BMPs for CRB not to grow. So within 131 degrees Fahrenheit, CRB dies. You want to make sure if they're going to be selling mulch, it maintains those BMPs. But if it's anything below that, you're selling larvae to the public.

So one of the challenges in Kona is within the Keauhole Ag park, for example, we went through with excavators, we found no larvae in the site back in July and larvae was found a few days ago. So next week I'm flying out and probably doing another fumigation operation which shows that unmanaged green waste is an issue.

And we are trying to clear out the entire Ag park to prevent that type of green waste existing. But it's not just the Ag Park. When BISC did a survey of the residential areas, they identified over 200 sites and and people's backyards with UAV that have green waste. So there's different dynamics it will take public.

This is where the public has to come in. So for example, we're talking about a DOT county operation right now where green waste can be collected and then taken over to the county for processing.

But the county's at capacity and Craig of the county has had so many discussions with DEM and DOH about building a multi million dollar green waste site to increase that capacity to build this. And this is happening while the BEETLE is currently in this rapid response phase.

And for Maui County, if they don't have a green waste site like that ready, there could be an issue if this happens there.

So this is some of the issues is how do we process more green waste, increase the hours of operation for that, improve regulatory fines for movement of that waste out of high risk areas, specifically with the managed green waste and enforce unmanaged green waste. Patrick identified.

There is some regulatory laws that can be used if there is a managed green waste being dumped. But once again enforcement who's watching to give them those citations and how can we do that without. We don't have regulations with that per se.

But even with littering rules, somebody has to basically catch them dropping the screen waste for us to then cite them. And then who's going to remove it? Who wants to bring in trucks? There's lots of Challenging terrain in Kona in this very specific example.

So with all these dynamics in mind, communicating BMPs to the public is something that DAB did an excellent job with with the voluntary stop movement. But as the county says, it's voluntary and they want it to be mandatory or an interim rule. So that's something that hopefully will be happening soon.

And I think this is where the community engagement really needs to come in. And with this upcoming dynamic that we're trying to figure out of how to move green waste from residential areas off, and if somebody doesn't want to move it, how can they get it to a way where it's managed to reduce the risk?

So it's a really complicated question because there's so many factors that go into this. And yeah, that's where we're running into these hurdles. But eventually, when the virus biological control is ready, the adults do move through and spread the virus to larvae as they're breeding in these piles.

So our goal right now is to mitigate this green waste and improve public awareness and just to basically reduce population in these areas on every island. But it is very challenging.

Thank you. Chair, may I ask just a clarifying question? Mason, when you talked about the potential mandatory stop movement, just to clarify so folks know and make sure I'm tracking, you're talking about the county instead of county of Hawaii, instead of making it voluntary, moving that status to mandatory. Correct.

Am I understanding? I think it would have to come from the regulatory authority, which would be the Department of Agriculture.

Right. It would have to come from Department. Of Agriculture and Biosecurity for the stop movement.

Correct. When you said interim rules, you were referring to the Department of Ag and Biosecurity. That's correct. Thank you for the clarification. I just wanted to clarify the roles of county of Hawaii vs Department of Ag and Biosecurity. Thank you. I appreciate that.

I want to point out that the county of Hawaii is extremely supportive. Their mayor and their staff have been very involved and we're very grateful for that support as we go through this rapid response.

Yeah. There is an interim rule that has been put in place for Molokai in order to protect them from coconut rhinoceros beetle. But we still have not had one put in place for the Kona area.

Thank you.

There is one other role that the Department of Health can assist with, and that is the vector control. Our vector control branch is actively involved in. Hi. But there's the other arm of the Department of Health, which is the Environmental Management Division. We have A solid waste section that helps manage green waste.

We also have the Clean Air branch. And with that, the Clean Air branch issues permits for Ag burns. And so sometimes people will burn their piles to stop the spread. There's also a exemption in our rules. For open burns. To mitigate pests. And so in that instance, the county. Or.

The Department of Ag would come to the Department of Health and ask for approval to do these open burns. We have done, we have allowed open burns with Department of Ag in 2014 in conjunction with. The. Pearl harbor to burn for CRBs. So that is something that we can also do.

We also approved recently Ag burn on the Big Island. So that's something that we can do to help from the regulatory standpoint.

Which brings back my question and concern about the multi jurisdictional lattice work that we have. Because a lot of this requires quick response.

And if we get tangled in intergovernmental communications and decision making, and this is where I'm concerned about that something that we could have solved relatively quickly, if we let it go for a month or six weeks, then we've lost that opportunity. And so that's what I'm concerned about as we go through all of this.

I mean, definitely communication is key and potentially, and I haven't been in this position long, but if we can potentially convene emergency meetings, I think that's something that we can potentially look into as far as, hey, there's this new threat.

Let's all get on the horn and talk about it in an emergency HISC meeting in order to address that. And I think that's something that we should, you know, potentially. I mean we have all this online zoom and whatnot that we can get everyone together relatively quickly.

So but then it's making the decision. It's not just communicating. Someone's got to say, okay, go. That's where I'm concerned.

Senator Richard, would mind if I add to that? Sure. So I'd say the best response is prevention. Basically that's why early prevention, we're funding our horizon scanning project right now to really see what's on the horizon that can get into Hawaii.

And the more money that goes into evaluating what's out there through risk analyses, Horizon scanning and early prevention can really go with that. Obviously the next layer is early detection, rapid response with that. And that's where it comes in. And BMPs, we do regularly go through those within interagency responses.

So for example, in Kona we're already hour zero with assigned by agency tasks. And for other ant species, we do have those ready. Some of these program, some of these plans do need to be updated to reflect current agency capacity.

But we do try to update these and maintain realistic response plans with what we have for high priority pests. But I think we could have obviously more response plans for pests that we're not even thinking about yet.

That's what I think tying into the Department of Transportation makes logical sense because that's where we're going to have its introductions. We raised a concern during one of the WHAM hearings about the Ag declaration form coming in and currently right now where it's reported it's only being filled out by about 75% of people coming in.

That's a huge puka as far as our biosecurity. So again I'm concerned about the agency collaboration, cooperation and then decision making. Thanks. True. Okay.

So I kind of just a General question because we're seeing this transition. We kind of started it last session. So I'm curious if you could just. Share how. Those discussions have been going and just for an example of just putting HIQ under the Department coach on biosecurity. So we had a presentation from Biosecurity from DAAB.

They have a dashboard on treatment of CRB and then we just had a presentation on the 643 Pest dashboard that has the reporting things. And in my mind it seems like eventually when the transition happens these two could be integrated to also give somebody. Looking at.

The reporting and then the treatment overlaid and being able to see all of that in one place. So I'm just curious how those discussions have been going.

Well definitely there's still a ways to go in that and I don't know when and how that will happen but. But I don't think we've really had that discussion. I mean definitely there should be at some point a merging between the 643pest.org and the 643pest phone hotline.

And those things should become hopefully one contained thing with information flowing between the two modes of people reporting. And then of course it would be great to have because the data is very different as far as treatments versus reports. Those two things are likely going to be still very different, two different products.

But nonetheless we could potentially make that available when that transition happens as far as and making them available on a similar or same website so that people can see the response to whatever recording is happening.

Yeah. I just want to thank everyone for all the work that you do in helping us keep Paradise Paradise. But. But we're here to support you so thank you. All right. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Chairs, Meeting briefing is adjourned.

Sa.