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This New York Times article reports on the lengthening fire season in the western US and beyond. From the article: Fires, once largely confined to a single season, have become a continual threat in some places, burning earlier and later in the year, in the United States and abroad. They have ignited in the West during the winter and well into the fall, have arrived earlier than ever in Canada and have burned without interruption in Australia for almost 12 months.
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This study investigated the effects of container volume and fertilization on the performance of nursery-grown Wyoming big sagebrush seedlings following outplanting. Researchers found that container volume may influence seedling morphology and optimize establishment, while field fertilization, especially during spring outplanting when planting sites have low moisture availability, may hinder first-year survival.
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This study analyzed seasonal variation in the relative availability of soil water for the years 2001, 2004, and 2007, representing respectively, low, moderate, and high rankings of areas burned. For these selected years, the model predicted where forest fires >1 km occurred and did not occur at ~100,000 randomly located pixels with an average accuracy of 69%. The model identified four seasonal combinations, most of which included exhaustion of available water storage capacity during the summer as critical; two combinations involving antecedent conditions the previous spring or fall accounted for 86% of the predicted fires. The approach introduced in this paper can help identify forested areas where management efforts to reduce fire hazards might prove most beneficial.
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This study compared trees in 6- to 28-year-old burned and unburned sites in the third drought year in mixed conifer forests at low elevation in Kings Canyon, Sequoia, and Yosemite national parks in California, USA. Common conifer species found in the burned plots had significantly reduced probability of mortality compared to unburned plots during the drought. Stand density was significantly lower in burned versus unburned sites, supporting the idea that reduced competition may be responsible for the differential drought mortality response.
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In this article, researchers report a dramatic population number expansion of Salsola ryanii in the decade since it was originally documented. Salsola ryanii has every indication of being just as invasive as its highly invasive parents.
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In this Live Science article, Francis Kilkenny, lead of Great Basin Native Plant Project (GBNPP), shares information about the GBNPP and how it continues to support more successful rangeland restoration.
Lessons learned, so far include:
- Climate is more important than geography when predicting how well seeds will grow and establish themselves. Seeds don’t care where their parents lived if the temperature suits them and if they get the right amount of sunshine and precipitation.
- Timing of seed planting makes a big difference. Year to year, even week to week, variation in weather patterns can affect the restoration success of a burned site.
- Method of planting matters. To achieve the best results, scientists recommend tamping seeds into the ground to ensure they have good contact with the soil, or in some cases, planting a species in the form of “plugs.”
- Long-term monitoring after planting is critical to determine the effectiveness of different seed mixes and restoration techniques.
- Keeping livestock off seeded rangeland for at least three years improves a restoration effort’s likelihood of success.
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This study suggests that introduced species have disproportionately expanded their ranges upward in elevation over the past century when compared with native species. While these shifts in introduced species may not be exclusively driven by climate, they highlight the importance of considering the interacting factors of climate-driven range shifts and invasion to understand how floras are responding in the face of anthropogenic change.
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The purpose of this paper is to recommend a framework and methodology for incorporating hydrologic data and ecohydrologic relationships in Ecological Site Descriptions (ESDs) and thereby enhance the utility of ESDs for assessing rangelands and guiding resilience-based management strategies. The proposed framework increases the utility of ESDs to assess rangelands, target conservation and restoration practices, and predict ecosystem responses to management. The proposed enhancement of ESDs will improve communication between private land owners and resource managers and researchers across multiple disciplines in the field of rangeland management.
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This study evaluated the effects of fire on biological soil crusts of early-seral juniper. Compared with unburned plots, the biomass of cyanobacteria was diminished under juniper and sagebrush; it was reduced in the interspaces in both burned and unburned plots, presumably in response to generally harsher conditions in the postburn environment. Nitrogen fixation rates declined over time in juniper plots and interspaces but not in sagebrush plots. Although fire negatively affected some biological soil crust organisms in some parts of the early-seral juniper woodland, the overall impact on the crusts was minimal. If the intent of burning is to reduce juniper, burning of early-seral juniper woodland is appropriate, as most affected trees were killed. Burning early-seral juniper may be preferred for controlling juniper encroachment on rangeland.
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This study tested the stress-gradient hypothesis (SGH) in observations of 75 sites along overlapping water and heat stress and disturbance gradients. As stress-disturbance levels increase, sagebrush-herbaceous plant facilitation levels increase, the landscape will become increasingly aggregated as a product of necessary facilitation between sagebrush and herbaceous plants. This aggregation decreases the individual resilience of the native herbaceous plants, increases the competition from invasive plants, and decreases the overall stability and resilience of the sagebrush steppe ecosystem.