Tens of thousands of invasive species—from cheatgrass, blights, and tamarisk to hogs, fire ants, and boa constrictors—damage natural ecosystems, agricultural systems, human-built infrastructure, and even public health throughout the United States, costing billions of dollars each year.
The Wyoming census for the plant kingdom is out! Over 2,900 different kinds of vascular plants grow in the wild in Wyoming according to experts at UW’s Rocky Mountain Herbarium. They include more than 2,500 native species along with 372 nonnative ones as of 2018.
Locals speculate that Nevada’s largest fire may have started with a Fourth of July firework launched in a canyon. But no one really knows. The 2018 Martin Fire seemed small and innocuous, until a weather cell moved into northern Nevada.
In the spring of 2019 Elizabeth Leger drove out from her botany lab at the University of Nevada, Reno to her field site on the western edge of the 435,000 acres burned in the Martin Fire.
The four members of Gordon Custer’s research group gather around as he walks through the steps of data collection.
As Cara Nelson, a researcher and professor of ecosystem science and restoration at the University of Montana, hiked around Missoula’s foothills, she noticed abundant knapweed and cheatgrass growing amidst native bunchgrasses and wildflowers.
For many westerners, cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) is the exemplar invasive weed, well known for thriving in sagebrush landscapes where it crowds out native plants, fuels a devastating fire regime, and threatens wildlife and livestock grazing.
It’s a hot, sunny day in early April, and I’m out collecting GPS coordinates for stands of wetland vegetation in the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge on the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
The Noxious Weed
Since dalmatian toadflax was introduced in Wyoming, it has checked off all the boxes of an invasive species—it outcompetes native vegetation, reduces biodiversity, and is not palatable for wildlife or livestock.
Stepping through the tall grass, a family made their way to the edge of Kelly Warm Spring, a geothermal spring with a temperature that hovers around 77 degrees Fahrenheit year-round, in Grand Teton National Park.
One summer day in 1992, two teenage boys fishing Lake Mary Ronan watched a man dump a cooler
A mile outside of Browning, Montana, a watercraft inspector sits on the side of the highway next to her kennel.
One hundred thousand quagga mussels can live in a single square meter, and 450 trillion of them infest Lake Michigan alone.
Christy Bell rifled through a series of shallow drawers lining the walls of a dark, windowless lab.
The first time Michael Whitfield saw bighorn sheep in the high country he stood on a ridgeline in the shadow of the Teton Range and watched a group grazing along a plateau.
Natural resource managers strive to keep ecosystems functioning on their own.
Invasive species are not a new phenomenon, but over the past few decades the West has seen an explosion of all types in all ecosystems.
