Groups work to combat strong noxious weed year

Noxious weeds are blooming strong this year.

Forest Service botanist Deb Taylor said there could be a number of reasons why noxious weeds are so prevalent this year.

“We saw a big bloom of knapweed this year, and it could be a lot of different factors,” Taylor said. “It could have been a lot of snow, a lot of soil moisture, the perfect temperatures for them. It seemed to be a pretty prolific knapweed blooming year.”

Hadley Debree said these types of weeds are most annoying because they endanger the ecosystem around them.

On top of that, they aren’t very easy to get rid of completely.

“We’re really focused on controlling noxious weeds as opposed to eradicating them, because there’s just such a long process,” Debree said.

The Forest Service is working on breeding a weevil that eats only one type of plant: knapweed, a noxious weed.

Taylor said it works well in the Wood River Valley region because the terrain makes other forms of removal more difficult.