Created on Thursday, 26 April 2012 17:50 Published Date Hits:
2173 When Andrew Hansen first came to Bozeman – where he is an
ecology professor at Montana State University – he lived out of
town. “I didn’t even know what those pretty yellow flowers
were,” he said. He soon learned that they were leafy spurge, a
plant that arrived from Eurasia more than a century ago, brought
in as an ornamental, but with no natural predators to keep it in
check, it is now designated a noxious weed. “Weeds that don’t
stay put” are just one of the problems that accompany the
proliferation of rural subdivisions in the Greater Yellowstone
Ecosystem. Hansen – who now lives not in Bozeman’s exurbs but in
the town itself - was at Rocky Mountain College on Wednesday,
April 18, to talk about land use changes and human population
pressures in what he calls “the largest intact ecosystem in the
Lower 48 states.” At a lecture in Fortin Auditorium, Hansen
related the history of this ecosystem from 1860 to the present,
showing maps of a somew