How Introduced Plants May Behave Like Ecological Time Bombs

When our native flowering dogwood tree was laid waste by an imported fungus in the 1970’s, the east Asian kousa dogwood was widely planted as a disease-resistant replacement.  After 50 years, however, it has turned invasive.  Dr. Bethany Bradley of the University of Massachusetts Amherst explains that such a “lag period” is common among introduced plants and why this makes plant introduction a very risky gamble.