Fire and Rangelands

The sagebrush biome in the western United States is a focus of widespread conservation concern due to multiple interacting threats including larger, more severe wildfires. Given the immense scale of the region and limited resources, prioritizing restoration treatments is essential for optimizing risk reduction and managing for resilient ecosystems.

The sagebrush biome is rapidly deteriorating largely due to the ecosystem threats of conifer expansion, more frequent and larger wildfires, and proliferation of invasive annual grasses. Reversing the impacts of these threats is a formidable challenge.

Invasive annual grasses are often facilitated by fire, yet they can become ecologically dominant in susceptible locations even in the absence of fire. We used an extensive vegetation plot database to model susceptibility to the invasive annual grass cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum L.) in the sagebrush biome as a function of climate and soil water availability variables.

Background

Understanding fire and large herbivore interactions in interior western forests is critical, owing to the extensive and widespread co-occurrence of these two disturbance types and multiple present and future implications for forest resilience, conservation and restoration.

The invasive annual grass, medusahead, infests rangelands throughout the West, from the Columbia Plateau to the California Annual Grasslands and the Great Basin.

Background
Fire modulates herbivore dynamics in open ecosystems. While extensive work demonstrates the interaction between fire and vertebrate grazers, less research describes how grasshopper herbivory dynamics respond to fire.

Sagebrush ecosystems of western North America are experiencing widespread loss and degradation by invasive annual grasses. Positive feedbacks between fire and annual grasses are often invoked to explain the rapid pace of these changes, yet annual grasses also appear capable of achieving dominance among vegetation communities that have not burned for many decades.

Sagebrush-steppe restoration has long been seen as a wicked problem—each case has multifaceted problems with no universal solutions—and thus managers have had to adopt adaptive management techniques to meet ever-changing landscape demands.