Article / Book
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Let us examine each of C. E. Fleming’s contentions concerning the status of cheatgrass as a forage species in light of what has happened during the last half of the 20th century to Nevada rangelands. Hindsight is a wonderful procedure that allows one to be pretentious, so we evaluate the Fleming contentions in terms of their foresight.
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Although this study helped pinpoint optimal defoliation parameters for cheatgrass control, it also called into question the potential for livestock grazing to be an effective seed-bed preparation technique in native plant reseeding projects in cheatgrass-dominated areas.
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Cattle removed 80 to 90% of standing biomass in grazed plots in May of 2005 and 2006 when B. tectorum was in the boot (phenological) stage. Grazed and ungrazed plots were burned in October 2005 and 2006. The combined grazing–burning treatment was more effective than either treatment alone in reducing B. tectorum seed input and seed bank density, and in shifting species composition from a community dominated by B. tectorum to one composed of a suite of species, with B. tectorum as a component rather than a dominant. This study provides a meso-scale precursor for landscape-scale adaptive management using grazing and burning methodologies.
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Grazing exacerbates Bromus tectorum dominance in one of North America’s most endangered ecosystems by adversely impacting key mechanisms mediating resistance to invasion. If the goal is to conserve and restore resistance of these systems, managers should consider maintaining or restoring: (i) high bunchgrass cover and structure characterized by spatially dispersed bunchgrasses and small gaps between them; (ii) a diverse assemblage of bunchgrass species to maximize competitive interactions with B. tectorum in time and space; and (iii) biological soil crusts to limit B. tectorum establishment. Passive restoration by reducing cumulative cattle grazing may be one of the most effective means of achieving these three goals.
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This article highlights the experiences and observations of the contributing contract graziers and agency land managers. The contract graziers share their personal knowledge of providing land services in a diverse array of situations, from small, rigorously managed parcels to watershed-scale projects. They expound on the immense planning, preparation, and oversight necessary to successfully conduct a vegetation management contract, as well as the challenges of surviving economically in the industry. Public land managers reveal the challenges of employing targeted grazing on public lands and provide insight on what must be done to make targeted grazing a widely accepted management practice.
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Flying Mule Farm has provided targeted grazing services for small- to medium-sized (under 250 acres) projects in the Sierra foothills since 2008. We have also worked with several large targeted grazing contractors to manage large scale projects in the foothills and the Sacramento Valley. We have found that combining the scientific underpinnings of range science with the art of managing livestock, ecological processes, and human beings makes the business of targeted grazing uniquely challenging.
The book, Exotic brome-grasses in arid and semiarid ecosystems of the western US: causes, consequences, and management implications, is presented in several chapters.
Access is provided for the following chapters -
Chapter 1 - Introduction: Exotic annual Bromus in the western USA
Chapter 2 - Exotic annual Bromus invasions: comparisons among species and ecoregions in the western US
Chapter 3 - Ecosystem impacts of exotic annual invaders in the genus Bromus
Chapter 7 - Community ecology of fungal pathogens on Bromus tectorum
Chapter 8 - Soil moisture and biogeochemical factors influence the distribution of annual Bromus species
Chapter 9 - Bromus response to climate and projected changes with climate change
Chapter 10 - Plant community resistance to invasion by Bromus species: The roles of community attributes, Bromus interactions with plant communities, and Bromus traits
Chapter 11 - Land uses, fire, and invasion: Exotic annual Bromus and human dimensions
Chapter 12 - Assessing restoration and management needs for ecosystems invaded by exotic annual Bromus species
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This study reviewed published studies on reburns in fire-adapted ecosystems of the world, including temperate forests of North America, semi-arid forests and rangelands, tropical and subtropical forests, grasslands and savannas, and Mediterranean ecosystems. To date, research on reburns is unevenly distributed across the world with a relative abundance of literature in Australia, Europe and North America and a scarcity of studies in Africa, Asia and South America. This review highlights the complex role of repeated fires in modifying vegetation and fuels, and patterns of subsequent wildfires. In fire-prone ecosystems, the return of fire is inevitable, and legacies of past fires, or their absence, often dictate the characteristics of subsequent fires.
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Our results demonstrated that the important predictors from Lidar-derived metrics had a strong correlation with field-measured biomass in the Random Forests (RF) regression models. The Stepwise Multiple Regression (SMR) results were similar but slightly better than RF. Overall, both RF and SMR methods explained more than 74% of the variance in biomass, with the most important Lidar variables being associated with vegetation structure and statistical measures of this structure (e.g., standard deviation of height was a strong predictor of biomass). Using our model results, we developed spatially-explicit Lidar estimates of total and shrub biomass across our study site in the Great Basin, U.S.A., for monitoring and planning in this imperiled ecosystem.
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Models explained much of the variability between predictions and manual measurements, and yet it is expected that future applications could produce even better results by reducing some of the methodological sources of error that we encountered. Our work demonstrates how terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) can be used efficiently to extend manual measurement of vegetation characteristics from small to large plots in grasslands and shrublands, with potential application to other similarly structured ecosystems. Our method shows that vegetation structural characteristics can be modeled without classifying and delineating individual plants, a challenging and time-consuming step common in previous methods applying TLS to vegetation inventory. Improving application of TLS to studies of shrub-steppe ecosystems will serve immediate management needs by enhancing vegetation inventories, environmental modeling studies, and the ability to train broader datasets collected from air and space.