SALT LAKE CITY — Climate change will likely shuffle some of the West’s most troublesome invasive weeds, adding to the burden in some areas and providing opportunities for native plant restoration in others, according to a new study.
In many cases, a warming climate will provide more welcoming conditions for invasive plants to get a foothold, spread quickly and crowd out native species, according to the study by Princeton University researchers.
But some invasives might retreat from millions of acres in the West — at least briefly — and offer land managers an opportunity to re-establish native plants, the study said. The window for action, though, will probably be short.
“We’re going to have to be in the right place at the right time before something else gains a foothold,” said Bethany Bradley, a biogeographer at Princeton and lead author on the study.
Nonnative weeds and plants followed in the footsteps, sometimes literally, of European settlers as they spread across the West.
Even one of the West’s most famous symbols, the tumbling tumbleweed, isn’t from these parts. Its origins are in Russia.
Today, nonnative plants across the West cost millions of dollars in damage to farms and ranches, alter the flow of water and function of ecosystems, provide fuels for fast-burning wildfires, and force government agencies to spend millions in response.
“Every county that I know of in the West has got nonnative or invasive weeds in it,” said Steve Dewey at Utah State University’s extension office. “My advice to county weed departments is to give new invaders high priority, to stop them before they get out of hand.”
Bradley and two other Princeton scientists wanted to look at how changing climate conditions would affect the spread of weeds.
They used 10 atmospheric models to predict how the West’s climate will change by 2100. The results were published in the latest edition of the scientific journal Global Change Biology.
