Invasive Plants: Tamarisk
Posted on March 11, 2007 Comments (4)
To Save the West, Kill a Plant by Josh McDaniel:
In the delicately dry ecosystems of the southwestern United States, that is a serious problem, adding up to over 800 billion gallons of lost water per year across the parched region. “That is equal to the water needs of 20 million people or one million acres of irrigated farmland,” said Tim Carlson, an environmental engineer and director of the Tamarisk Coalition, which aims to control the plant.
Living systems include risks for those that attempt to engineer improvement. The past is littered with examples of attempts to intervene that go wrong.
I don’t think there is a simple answer. We are going to have intentional and unintentional consequences results from our actions. To me the lesson is to learn from our past that we often have unintended consequences that are worse than we envisioned and we need to be careful. We can’t assume there are no risks that we don’t know about. There are risks we can’t predict.
Related: Invassive Plants articles – More Nutritious Wheat
Categories: Engineering, Life Science, Science, Students
Tags: invasive species, plants
4 Responses to “Invasive Plants: Tamarisk”
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March 25th, 2008 @ 5:42 pm
“new design for cargo ships that would eliminate ballast tanks, the water-filled compartments that enable non-native creatures to sneak into the Great Lakes from overseas. At least 185 non-native aquatic species have been identified in the Great Lakes, and ballast water is blamed for the introduction of most…”
April 21st, 2008 @ 12:08 am
The most likely scenario, said Garbelotto, is that the pathogen arrived in California through the nursery trade, and that it then spread from the nursery in Santa Cruz to trees bordering the facility…
October 12th, 2008 @ 9:26 am
the insect threatens one of the world’s largest forest systems: Canada’s boreal forest, a 600-mile-wide band of pine woodlands that stretches from the Yukon in Alaska all the way to Newfoundland on the East Coast…
March 14th, 2009 @ 11:29 am
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