Lantana - the perfumed and colourful garden plant - has a leading role in an environmental horror story with a plot unfolding quietly around us.

With the success of the Australian film Lantana bringing new fame to this familiar cultivar, a scientist from the Cooperative Research Centre for Australian Weed Management, has issued his list of all time plant villains that make up a mean cast.

"Lantana is up there with my Ten Top Terrors for the natural environment," says Dr Tony Grice, based at CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems in Townsville, "It's a landscape and pasture weed of the worst order. We refer to it as the 'blackberry of northern and eastern Australia'.

"Lantana infests millions of hectares globally, including key economic crops such as cotton, sugarcane and rice. In Australia alone it occupies 4 million hectares. We now have 29 naturalised varieties of lantana in Australia, and it's listed as one of our 'Weeds of National Significance.

"As we saw in the film, it forms dense thickets that smother native vegetation - it's a Biodiversity Bully'. Lantana is already present in 165 reserves in Queensland, and in all remnant rainforest areas down the NSW north coast. It's the region's most widespread rainforest weed, and has the potential to spread through all but the driest of the nation's coastal lands. A single square metre of lantana can produce several thousand berries, and the birds do the rest.

Dr Grice says that the invasion of environmentally valuable areas by lantana, and the loss of native species and public amenity that it caused, is only part of the real lantana story. Losses in Queensland pastures alone are estimated at $7.7m per year, with lantana toxicity killing 1500 animals annually. It is also a major weed of hoop pine and eucalypt plantations.

"We estimate that weeds cost Australia at least $3.5 billion each year in direct costs and lost production. Weeds are actually a bigger dollar problem than salinity, and directly affect many more rural landowners.

"That figure doesn't include biodiversity loss and other types of environmental degradation, which are hard to put dollar figures on. But we feel that loss intensely," says Dr Grice.

Dr Grice says that the tragedy is that most of these villains were deliberately introduced.

"We urgently need to do better at the entry and assessment stage when new plants are imported," he says. "We can't go on allowing 20 new invasive species a year to make themselves at home here."

Dr Grice says the other nine in his list of Ten Top Terrors for the natural environment are:

• Parkinsonia - invades seasonal wetlands and river banks
• Serrated Tussock - takes over inland native grasslands
• Bitou Bush, Boneseed - bullies native coastal vegetation
• Bridal Creeper - a smotherer, but science appears to be winning this one with biocontrol
• Rubber Vine - forms dense thickets in Queensland's Gulf river systems
• Mesquite - in semi-arid and arid watercourses, and Mitchell grasslands
• Giant Sensitive Plant (Mimosa pigra) - the biggest, meanest wetland bully of all, locks out native plants, animals and people
• Para Grass - takes over waterbird breeding habitats and tropical streams.
• Weedy Sporobolus - invades woodland and pasture, but has zero nutritional value.

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Grazing land being taken over by lantana, Ma Ma Creek, near Gatton, Qld. Photo: Michael Day, Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Mines.

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More information from:

Dr Tony Grice 07-4753 8543 (w), 07-4725 7201 (h) 0409 511 990(m)

Peter Martin, CRC 08 8303 6693, 0429830366

http://www.anbg.gov.au/weeds/weeds.html  

http://www.weeds.org.au/

This is a joint media release of CSIRO and the Cooperative Research Centre for Australian Weeds Management