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Colorado State University's Center For Ecological Management Of Military Lands Holds Open House In New Building

Monday, February 17, 1997

FORT COLLINS--The Center for Ecological Management of Military Lands at Colorado State University will host an open house 1-3 p.m. Feb. 21 to celebrate the completion of its newly remodeled building.

The center is now housed in the former Vocational Education Building on University Street, north of Jack Christiansen Memorial Track on campus. The open house culminates six months of renovations to the 11,332 square-foot building, originally built in 1910 and recently added to the State Historic Registry. Renovations cost about $700,000.

Refreshments will be served. Employees will host tours of the new facility and demonstrate some of the center's ongoing projects.

The new location enables the center's 45 employees, graduate students and research associates to operate under one roof, said Robert Shaw, the center's director. Previously, staff and research personnel and facilities were scattered across campus.

"This is a major step in solidifying the center's role in surveying the biological resources of military lands and helping the U.S. military manage those lands in a responsible way," Shaw said.

The CEMML was created in 1985 to help the U.S. Department of Defense research, identify and inventory plant species on portions of the 25 million acres tied up in military installations. The center is one of the largest single research efforts at Colorado State University, attracting more than $7 million in federal grants annually.

Since its inception, the center has conducted field work and research on 85 military installations in the United States and Germany. Studies show that military installations are a haven for rare or endangered plant species, thus making natural resource management imperative. In other cases, constant military exercises have degraded plant communities that are crucial to maintaining realistic training exercises.

As part of its duties, the center's floristics laboratory conducts surveys on military installations to document all plant species. Researchers collect samples of these plants for the center's extensive collection and propagate endangered species to learn more about their life history and survival mechanisms.

Using global positioning system technology, researchers pinpoint the locations of endangered or rare plants and map them for the military to better manage existing natural resources.

"The Center for Ecological Management of Military Lands is a superb example of Colorado State University's achievements in developing knowledge for ecologically- based management planning," said Al Dyer, dean of the College of Natural Resources. "The center is internationally recognized for its leadership in the ecological management of military lands. This renovation will help continue that leadership role."

Some of the center's recent achievements include:

* A study at Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site in southeastern Colorado, which showed that tracked military vehicles contributed to the spread of a rare plant commonly known as leafy false goldenweed. That finding prompted the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to remove the plant from the list of endangered plant species. Range rehabilitation practices were proven ineffective and halted as a result of the center's research.

* Center researchers found two plant species previously thought to be extinct and a third not recorded since 1890 on the Pohakuloa Training Area in Hawaii. Information collected on two other rare species on this installation prompted the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to remove them from the list of threatened species.

* The center documented a steady decline in tree cover at Fort Carson in Colorado, prompting a tree planting program. The tree cover is vital to maintain realistic training exercises.

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