Fact Sheet / Brief
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What may appear at first glance as a sea of sagebrush is in reality a complex and diverse ecosystem with a wide variety of plants and animals. The sagebrush steppe teems with life, but threats such as wildfire, grazing and invasive species are affecting the resilience of rangeland across the Northwest. Learn more about the groups of plants that make up a healthy rangeland ecosystem.
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Indaziflam (Rejuvra®, Bayer) is a pre-emergent herbicide that can manage annual grass seed banks and provide long-term reductions with minimal harm to established perennial vegetation. Indaziflam provided significant, long-term reductions in cheatgrass cover and density in invaded sagebrush-grasslands in western Wyoming without negative effects on native vegetation species richness. Observations from the site after an unplanned wildfire suggest that treatment three years earlier may have prevented the fire from burning significant areas of two large aerial treatment plots, likely by reducing the amount and continuity of fine fuel. These results suggest that indaziflam may help managers mitigate the impacts of invasion and proactively protect intact shrublands from cheatgrass-altered fire regimes.
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Sagebrush ecosystems in the northern Great Basin face threats from invasive annual grasses and expanding conifers. Land managers need to work at large spatial scales to address these two ecological threats, but have limited resources to do so. This guide provides a framework for land managers to efficiently identify, discuss and address landscape-level threats. It is not an
instruction manual.
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Land managers face a mounting variety of challenges, including how to efficiently dispose of excessive woody residues on forest sites (especially in the Western United States), maintain and improve soil productivity, improve forest resilience to changes in climate (especially as it pertains to drought and fire), and increase the effectiveness of reforestation activities. The use of biochar, a charcoal that is not readily degraded and is made specifically for land application, may have a role in meeting these challenges. Moreover, biochar may provide nursery managers with opportunities to produce seedlings for reforestation and restoration in a more sustainable way, particularly by reducing irrigation inputs, as evidenced through several trials summarized here.
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Easy-to-understand monitoring frameworks create a common baseline resource standard that can be easily understood and allow diverse stakeholders with different needs to work together to restore and protect Mediterranean-type ecosystems into the future. This research brief provides an example of conceptual modeling framework.
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This California Fire Regime Ecoregion classification map (i.e., using clustered driver variability layers) aims to devise a fire regime classification that better aligns with ecosystem types.
This brief aims to clarify basic liability laws in California, using state law and case examples to further the collective understanding and comfort around prescribed fire liability.
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Forest Service researchers Becky Kerns and Michelle Day conducted a long-term experiment in the Malheur National Forest, Oregon, to assess how season and time between prescribed burns affect understory plant communities in ponderosa pine forests. They found that some native plants persisted and recovered from fire but didn’t respond vigorously, while invasive species tended to spread. These findings may help forest managers design more effective prescribed-fire treatments and avoid unintended consequences.
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This longer-term study essentially shows that native seed mixes do well in suppressing cheatgrass in the Great Basin, even when compared to familiar conventional mixes that include the highly competitive nonnative crested and Siberian wheatgrass. The conventional seed mixes lived up to their reputation and were effective at keeping cheatgrass cover below 2 percent, but the native seed mixes were not far behind, with cheatgrass cover of 3 percent to 6 percent–in contrast to unseeded control treatments where cheatgrass cover reached 9 percent to 15 percent. And using native seed mixes may not be cost-prohibitive anymore—the scientists found that the price of native species seed has come down over the years to be much closer to that of introduced mixes.
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View the complete pinyon-juniper synthesis
View fact sheet on pinyon-juniper ecology
View fact sheet on pinyon-juniper history
View fact sheet on pinyon-juniper ecohydrology
View fact sheet on pinyon-juniper management and restoration
This synthesis reviews current knowledge of pinyon and juniper ecosystems, in both persistent and newly expanded woodlands, for managers, researchers, and the interested public. We draw from a large volume of research papers to centralize information on these semiarid woodlands. The first section includes a general description of both the Great Basin and northern Colorado Plateau. The ecology section covers woodland and species life histories, biology, and ecology and includes a detailed discussion of climate and the potential consequences of climate change specific to the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau. The history section discusses 20,000 years of woodland dynamics and geographic differences among woodland disturbance regimes and resilience. The ecohydrology section discusses hydrologic processes in woodlands that influence soil conservation and loss; water capture, storage, and release; and the effect that woodland structure and composition have on these processes. The final section, restoration and management, covers the history of woodland management, the different methods used, the advantages and disadvantages of different vegetation treatments, and posttreatment vegetation responses. We also discuss successes and failures and key components that determine project outcomes important for consideration when restoring ecosystem function, integrity, and resilience.