ABSTRACT
One spring morning in 1995, ecologist Jayne Belnap walked into a dry grassland in Canyonlands National Park, Utah, an area that she has been studying for more than 15 years. “I literally stopped and went, ‘Oh my God!’ ” she recalls. The natural grassland —with needle grass, Indian rice grass, saltbush, and the occasional pinyon-juniper tree-that Belnap had seen the year before no longer existed; it had become overgrown with 2-foot-high Eurasian cheatgrass. “I was stunned,” says Belnap, “It was like the aliens had landed.”1
