Colorado Collection

The words in this book are based on the Thanksgiving Address, an ancient message of peace and appreciation of Mother Earth and all her inhabitants.

Colorado's boundaries encompass some 66.6 million acres, or over 104,000 square miles. Within this area, the type and extent of natural vegetation is determined by many factors, including elevation, climate, soils, disturbance patterns, and the ecological history of the landscape. Each change from lowland plain to mountain range to broad valley creates both habitat opportunities and barriers for plant species. The heterogeneity of the landscape provides...

The Opossum Shrimp Mysis diluviana (formerly M. relicta, herein Mysis) is a small, shrimp-like crustacean native to cold, deep lakes in the Great Lakes region of the U.S. and Canada. Mysis were introduced to lakes and reservoirs to improve resources for sport fishes. Mysis had important effects on food webs, but few studies have examined the outcomes of the introductions in Colorado or the extent of potential invasions by natural dispersal...

Climate change wasn't on the public's radar in 1995, when Mary Taylor Young and her husband bought their piece of the wild in the Colorado Rockies. They built a cabin, set up a trail of bluebird nest boxes, and began a nature journal of observations. Her twenty-five year journal, she realized, was a record of climate change, happening not on an Antarctic ice sheet but in their own natural neighborhood and echoed in everyone's backyard.

Over the last 30 years declines in greater sage-grouse populations have occurred across much of their range. Breeding populations had declined by an estimated 17-47% since the mid 1970s, a trend that has paralleled significant changes in the sagebrush habitats essential for the species. The primary factors affecting this change in sagebrush habitats differ by region and state but include changes in fire regime, conversion to cropland and seeded grasslands,...