Eradication Strawberry Guava (leaf gall)

[Carey]

Awesome turnout (one thing to note, ALL of the panel members were VERY supportive of the number & diversity that showed up....) It was standing room only throughout most of the meeting. At the beginning Cliff was very clear on how the meeting was to be run, and stuck to the plan, against a least one very vocal audience member (who repeatedly interupted the panel speakers during their presentations, until he was asked to leave... with escort)

This was set up & run as an informational meeting & it did cover a lot of the information on the intorduction of the invasive strawberry guava weed (intorduced from Brazil to HI in the 1820's, so not a real 'cultural' or 'Hawaiian' plant), The impact this plant is having on the native forest, the fact that the guava has an incredable replication rate of 10-14% per year!, the erradication problems (esp. with that population increase) - on the scale side; the investigation, the life cycle, the testing both in Brazil & the testing at Volcano on this scale and all of other potential hosts...
Very inclusive information (at least a couple of semesters of research to get the information they presented tonight!

They did have a short Q & A session (unfortunately shorter than the original plan, because of the one audience member that dominated some of the time...)
Cliff also promised that for any questions that were not answered, he would get answers & send them to the people (this included a lot of questions, some questions that were not related to the strawberry guava & the panels expertise...)

I was very impressed with the caliper of the panel, and could see that a lot of the audience (some of whom were very upset at the beginning) where impressed with the work the panel had done.... and the panel seemed very impressed with the audience (even the one who felt his voice should be the only one heard, up until his last outburst was treated with respect..)