State officials announced earlier this week that New Hampshire expects to receive over a million dollars in federal funds to combat the state's milfoil problem.
Currently dozens of lakes across the state are infested with the invasive aquatic plant.
The federal funds will go primarily to finding new ways to prevent milfoil from spreading.
New Hamphire Public Radio's Rakhee Vemulapalli reports.
1 million federal dollars will go to the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services to fund research into milfoil eradication.
Amy Smagula of DES says that some of the research will include finding and testing different herbicides that would be more specific to variable milfoil.
Other options under consideration says Smagula are so-called Biological controls that would eat away at the milfoil.
It’s using a predator or an herbivore that’s specific to milfoil to control just milfoil. So we don’t need to use chemicals we can use a bug specific to that plant.
If milfoil is not controlled, it's proven its ability to completely take over a lake in a very short time.
What's more, it doesn't take much to introduce milfoil to a lake.
Smagula says just a small piece of it on the bottom of a boat can cause infestation.
This is exactly like an environmental cancer.
Milfoil comes in, it grows very rapidly and it takes over the lake and it will kill everything that’s there.
DES has found milfoil infestation in 59 lakes across the state.
Removing the plants by hand and using bottom barriers have helped to stop the milfoil from completely taking over.
DES believes only one new lake was infested last year.
Jody Connor from DES says the state's Lake Host Program can take much of the credit for this success.
Program volunteers inspect boats for invasive aquatic plants at 64 public boat ramps on 50 New Hampshire lakes.
All the volunteer effort has played a big part in why we are starting to gain on the battle. We were beleaguered ten, fifteen years ago but now we’re seeing volunteers are really helping us locate it.
Not only do volunteers search for milfoil, but they educate boaters to be on the look out for suspicious looking plants.
The Lake Host Program can expand thanks to $90,000 of federal money.
One of its new projects is a pilot program in which
Lake Host workers give stickers to boaters who have their boats inspected.
The sticker is currently free and voluntary and officials say it serves primarily as an educational tool.
It simply shows that the boater is aware of New Hampshire's milfoil problem.
But next door in Maine, officials have taken an even more active approach.
Maine charges ten dollars to in-staters and fifteen dollars to out-of-staters for a yearly permit.
Unlike in New Hampshire, a boater must have the permit sticker in order to be on Maine's lakes.
John McPhedron from the Maine Department of Environmental Protection says the revenue from the sticker is critical to the State’s work on invasive aquatic plants.
The sticker has provided the funding mechanism not just for those of us working here but we contract out a lot of our work, for running the inspection program for example, for running our invasive plant patrol program, which is modeled off of New Hampshire’s weed watcher program and for providing funds to local efforts to control and manage invasive aquatic plants.
The New Hampshire Lakes Association is looking into following Maine’s example, but this will not happen in the near future.
Thanks to the federal grants, New Hampshire currently has other sources of revenue to fund its invasive aquatic species programs.
For NHPR News, this is Rakhee Vemulapalli.
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