Salt Cedar
Imperial National Wildlife Refuge
Arizona
Tamarix is not native to North America. It was introduced in the early 1900‘s. It was the human-created disaster of the “Dust Bowl” which led to its widespread introduction as a windbreak. It does well in arid areas because of its deep root system, persistence, and general hardiness. At some point some human figured out that the Tamarix was using a lot of water, where there is little, and crowding out all of the native vegetation in the riparian areas of the American Southwest. Figuring out that they had created another significant problem they set out to eradicated the genus from its non-native habitat. The current scheme involves the use of predatory beetles which will supposedly die off when they have killed all the Tamarix. Given our species’ poor history of intervention in natural processes that is not likely to be the case and we will have some other type of disaster on our hands.
