Fire and Rangelands

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.

Large wildfires have increased in western US rangelands over the last three decades. There is limited information on the impacts of wildfires with different severities on the vegetation in these rangelands.

The exotic annual grass ventenata ( Ventenata dubia L.) is raising concern as it rapidly invades multiple ecosystem types within the United States, including sagebrush steppe, ponderosa pine forests, woodlands, and much of the Palouse and Pacific Northwest Bunchgrass Prairie (PNB).

On the Ground: Invasive annual grasses pose a widespread threat to western rangelands, and a strategic and proactive approach is needed to tackle this problem. Oregon partners used new spatial data to develop a geographic strategy for management of invasive annual grasses at landscape scales across jurisdictional boundaries.