There is a wide variety of plants that live here in Wyoming, including introduced plants – those that were brought here from another continent – accidentally or intentionally, but usually by humans. The plants in this hay meadow were introduced ad provide a great hay crop

Introduced is as broad term that includes many, many plants. Most of them don’t cause any problems at all and many of them are actually beneficial. However, a very small portion of them – somewhere between one and ten percent cause a lot of serious problems. These are invasive plants – ones that escape our control and spread rapidly on there own.

Invasive plants like this Whitetop negatively affect us all, whether you are managing for wildlife habitat, agriculture or simply like to enjoy the great outdoors.

So natural resource managers spend a lot of time and effort trying to get rid of existing patches of weeds and prevent new ones from getting started. From the University of Wyoming Cooperative Extension Service, I’m Paul Meiman.