What’s spreading around in our town?

Like many of our neighbors throughout the Wasatch Front, I am a recent transplant to this area. With a growing economy and excellent access to natural areas, Salt Lake City and Utah Valley are wonderful places to live. All the recent transplants to our area have enriched our region and contributed to the economic opportunities that we have. However, with any population boom there are many challenges that we must face as a community.

As humans move to an area, they often change the area to better suit their own needs. By building new neighborhoods, creating routes to get to places, and changing the biology around them, we all have a large impact on our local ecology. One of the more dramatic ways people change an area is to bring with them plants to decorate yards and to eat. Often these plants are not found naturally in our area and have been cultivated in yards and gardens for generations. Even the most dedicated gardener will know that these plants often don’t want to stay where they are planted. This is one of the ways that non-native plants have spread into natural areas and come to dominate our landscapes.
I moved here a little less than a year ago. I was brought on as a new faculty member in the Biology Department at Utah Valley University to teach botany. Moving across the country, preparing to teach new courses, and setting up a research program is never a small task. Throw in a pandemic and it was a difficult time. My research involves non-native plants and how they can escape and become invasive. To do my research I need to find these invasive species and track where they came from. I also try to get a sense of how long it has been since they escaped and how the population has changed since an initial observation.

When I arrived to Utah I turned to iNaturalist and its group of citizen scientists to track down populations of plants to study. After unpacking, the first search I did was to find populations of the non-native watercress in our area. This made it easy for me to track down plants to study and start my research program. Currently I am growing around 100 plants in the greenhouse at UVU to get a better idea of how watercress arrived into Utah and understand the success of its invasion of Utah Valley. Other researchers and I depend on good observations in iNaturalist to better understand the biotic world around us, particularly in these changing times. Observations like the ones that will be made during the CNC this coming week help guide my research questions and provide a base line and an opportunity to find non-native plants at the start of their invasions. Who knows maybe that “weird plant thing” found during the CNC will be an opportunity to control our next invasive species threat before it consumes our natural areas?

Michael C. Rotter, is an assistant professor of biology at Utah Valley University. You can follow him on iNaturalist through is handle (michael329) and find out more about his research through his website: https://rotterplantecology.weebly.com/

Publicado el abril 27, 2021 04:15 TARDE por michael329