Our first guest speaker got me thinking more and more about the invisible factors at play in an ecosystem, especially the cycle of water through an ecosystem. My awareness of water systems began when I was living at my grandma's house and we had visitors from the watershed council to look at features of the land that could be affecting water distribution, most notably invasive water-hogging weeds. There are a multitude of factors that need to be taken into consideration when examining a water system; invasive weeds are merely one issue that arises when trying to understand and control the flow of water in an ecosystem. Certainly one of the most important factors - and one of the most visible in Oregon - is the level of precipitation. However, what happens to the water after it falls is equally important, and substantially more difficult to understand.
I, myself am not very familiar with all of the issues surrounding the watershed in this area. However, I do know about some of the invasive weeds in this area. In my experience, the most common are tansy weed, canadian thistle, scotch broom, and more recently, false brome. Some of these look pretty innocuous but they actually divert a lot of the water from the rest of the ecosystem, which is a problem even in a state like Oregon. Here are some links with photos and information about a few invasive species in Oregon:
http://extension.oregonstate.edu/news/story.php?S_No=973&storyType=garde
http://www.oregon.gov/ODA/PLANT/WEEDS/profile_tansyragwort.shtml
http://www.oregon.gov/ODA/PLANT/WEEDS/profile_canadathistle.shtml
http://www.oregon.gov/ODA/PLANT/WEEDS/profile_scotchbroom.shtml
While expecting that humans can change the course of nature is ultimately futile, it is always good to spread knowledge of things like invasive species so that we might see some improvement in the ecosystem if awareness of the issue spreads to enough people.
How neat! I thought this was a really interesting this to blog about and made me think a lot about other systems in nature. What is it about these pesky weeds that soak up so much water? It made me think about illnesses? Like, "flu season". It spreads so quickly, and some people do not soak up the germs as easily as others. I see immune systems like the weeds in your post and some immune systems really "soak up" the flu. In this case, for those of us who do not get sick, I guess it is a good thing!
ReplyDeleteI've definitely heard about scotch broom as an invasive species, but I never thought about it causing problems in ways other than taking up space. It also makes sense that even here in Oregon there would be competition for water. The types of plants that grow here are going to be the ones that require a lot of rain and if there is a lot of rain then the plants are going to grow to the maximum capacity set by the amount of water or at least to the maximum of the most scarce resource, according to Meadows.
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