FIGURE 0 · STAGE 00 / 10 — THE BASELINE

Conventional Rubus niveus control combines manual cutting with repeated foliar spraying

(A) One block, six years, one pass per loop. Outside it, an untreated wall of blackberry stands as the visual baseline. Year 1 opens with the cut — canes to ~5 cm, crowns left in the ground — then herbicide and two hand-pulls. Years 2–4 return every three months, years 5–6 every six, each visit sweeping the block and knocking back growth as it arrives. Nothing leaves the plot: cut cane greys where it falls, pulled material drops where it’s pulled. Below ground, the seed bank tops up at every pass, and each year’s herbicide stays exactly where it landed.

UNTREATED WALL OUTSIDE THE BLOCK — 2.1–3.9 mREGROWTH — SPRAYED AT ~1 MONTH, THEN ×2CUT TO ~5 cm — CROWNS ARE NOT EXTRACTEDCUT CANE AND PULLED MATERIAL — IT BUILDS UPHERBICIDE — ON THE GROUND AND DOWN INTO ITSEED BANK — TOPPED UP AT EVERY REMOVAL
DOCUMENTED PROCEDURE
cut  machete, to ~5 cm
biomass  left in situ to decompose
off-take  none — nothing leaves the plot
herbicide  glyphosate + MSM / picloram
timing  m1, m2, m3, on regrowth — entry only
follow-up  manual: machete, trimmer, hand-pull
interval  3-monthly → 6-monthly ≈ from yr 5
cost  US$400 ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹ — Rentería 2012
terminal state  none defined
AONE TREATED BLOCK — THE YEAR NOW PLAYINGEach pass of the loop is the NEXT year of the same block, not a replay of the first. 1 m — scaled from adult cattle stature
B SIX YEARS OF THE DOCUMENTED REGIME — WHAT STOPS, WHAT LIGHTENS, AND WHAT NEVER ENDS Panel A is ONE year of that work — the lit band is the year now playing, and each pass of the loop is the NEXT year, not a replay of the first. The chemical phase ends after month 3 and the interval widens from year 5 — the regime does lighten. What it does not do is finish. SUGGESTED MANAGEMENT TARGET — 40 % COVER OPERATIONS CUT SPRAY ×3 MANUAL REMOVAL, EVERY 3 MONTHS machete, weed trimmer, hand-pulling — no further herbicide EVERY 6 MONTHS ≈ from year 5 — published data differs 0.000.512001.024000122436486072 YEAR 1 / 6 MONTHS SINCE FIRST CUT — the axis ends because the page does, not because the cycle does RELATIVE 0–1 ABOVE-GROUND R. NIVEUS COVER CUMULATIVE COST — US$400 ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹ (Rentería 2012), no terminal value SEED BANK — CDF “at least 4 y” (solid); Rentería ≥10 y (dashed); GISD >50 y (dotted) — temperate analogy, not measured here INTERVAL 3-monthly → 6-monthly — published data differs: Jäger et al. 2024 · Walentowitz et al. 2021 CUMULATIVE US$ ha⁻¹
FOR LEGENDS AND MORE DETAILS, KEEP SCROLLING DOWN
READ TOGETHER. Above-ground cover is suppressed and recovers; the seed bank declines on a schedule nobody has measured; the cost line has no asymptote. The panels say what the literature says — this is containment, and containment is an indefinite commitment. TERMINOLOGY. The herbicide step is a foliar application — spraying. It is not fumigation, which in English means enclosed-space gas treatment. No burning is depicted. SEED-BANK LONGEVITY IS CONTESTED: the solid line is CDF's “at least 4 years”, the dashed lines Rentería's ≥10 y and GISD's >50 y — the last an explicit analogy to temperate Rubus, not a Galápagos measurement. The fan between them is the honest state of knowledge. THE LOOP IN (A) IS NOT ONE YEAR REPLAYED: each pass of the loop is the NEXT year of the same block, and the work in it changes. Year 1 carries the cut and the three herbicide applications; years 2–4 open on worked ground and carry four manual passes; years 5–6 carry two. Nothing above the ground line is reset between loops — the wall falls once, in year 1, and the litter, the deposit and the seed bank below it only ever accumulate.
Documented practice · not a proposal
BIOMASS MANAGEMENT & SEED-BANK LONGEVITY. Practices such as burning, chipping, composting, or off-site removal are entirely undocumented in the Park programme. As a default, all cut canes and hand-pulled materials are left in place to decompose. Because the blackberry fruits year-round, this cut biomass retains ripe seeds that stay directly on the plot. Consequently, re-establishment is fueled by an immense seed bank estimated at ~7,000 seeds per square meter. The timeline for seed viability is heavily contested, which is why control efforts must recur indefinitely: The Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF) estimates viability at at least 4 years, while other estimates run much longer.
THE COST LINE IS THE WEAKEST NUMBER ON THIS PAGE. US$400 ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹ is Rentería 2012, and it is carried here only because it is the figure in the literature. CDRS reports a day rate of US$70 per jornalero plus benefits; at that rate US$400 buys under six crew-days per hectare per year, against a regime of two to four passes a year over broken ground. The number is almost certainly low by an order that this workstream has not measured, and the slope of the orange line should be read as at least this steep, never as an estimate. The crew-days per hectare are the missing measurement.
MONTH 0
YR 1 · THEN
MONTH 1
YR 1
MONTH 2
YR 1
MONTH 3
YR 1 · 2-4
MONTH 6
EVERY YEAR
MONTH 9
YR 1 · 2-4
MONTH 12
YEAR 7 · 8 …
SPACE tap = pause · hold = fast-forward · double-tap = restart · drag the handle to scrub STOPPED PLAYING