At an old metal desk in a crowded basement room on the Colorado State University campus, Weld County’s future is under the microscope.
Tiny, glittering bronze shards, all that remains of a single winter-killed beetle, float in a vial of alcohol. Patrick McPherren, Colorado’s state plant health director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, picked them up from the owner of a woodlot in Greeley and brought them to entomology professor Boris Kondratieff’s lab at the C.P. Gillette Museum of Arthropod Diversity.