Fact Sheet / Brief
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To revegetate disturbed desert lands, practitioners often reestablish fertile islands as a first step in restoring native plants and associated fauna on disturbed desert sites. This research brief discusses the pros and cons of this approach considering native and non-native species.
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The Pacific Northwest Region of the Forest Service’s “Eastside Restoration Strategy” aimed to improve forest health conditions by accelerating the pace and scale of restoration on national forests in eastern Oregon and Washington. As part of this effort, the Regional Office created a dedicated interdisciplinary Blue Mountains Restoration Strategy Team (ID Team) to conduct landscape-level planning across four national forests and innovate strategies to more effectively reach planning decisions. We conducted interviews with 25 key informants, observed meetings, analyzed documents, and worked with an advisory group to understand transferrable insights from the project.
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The WUI is often synonymous with fire risk to buildings, but this research suggests that this is not the case in all fire-prone states. While fire outreach was often present near areas where buildings are destroyed by wildfire, many communities are established after major fires.
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Discussions of successes, struggles, and failures with partner-specific tools are vital to the successful implementation of “translational ecology” a formal term for biological conservation partnerships.
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We have been studying the WUI in the U.S. for more than 10 years, looking at where WUI areas were once located, where they are now, and where we expect them to be in the coming decades. Our new data set provides the first high-resolution data on WUI change from 1990 to 2010, revealing how housing growth and wildland vegetation have combined over time. We developed new algorithms that converted the decennial Census standalone data into a consistent dataset on housing growth across the conterminous U.S.
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A study comparing insect communities in grazed, rested, and idled pastures in Montana found that the types of insects that provide a critical food source for sage grouse chicks and other shrub- and grassland-dependent birds were 13 percent more prevalent on managed versus idled rangelands.
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Key findings of this research were:
- Burned low-elevation sagebrush sites can be seeded with mixes of native grasses, forbs and shrubs using rangeland drills adapted for seeding large and small seeds in separate rows.
- Seeding technique, timing of seed application, and seeding rate are important considerations when seeding Wyoming big sagebrush.
- The best techniques for establishing Wyoming big sagebrush are seeding at high rates via a drill in late fall.
- Success of seeding treatments on semiarid sites is ultimately dependent on weather conditions and competitive pressure from invasive weeds, and it may be best to delay treatments until conditions are predicted to be favorable, depending on the feasibility of weed control at the site.
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In this study, we conducted a field and data synthesis of nine years of annual plant communities occurring below perennial plants the National Park Service (NPS) had outplanted in 2008. At 30 sites disturbed by road construction and that were revegetated by NPS, we measured annual and perennial plants in 2009 (one year after nursery-grown perennials were outplanted at the sites), 2010, 2011, and 2017 (nine years after restoration). We also made these same measurements below vertical mulch structures.
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In this study, researchers measured vegetation structure and fuel moisture (pre-burn), weather conditions, belowground heat dosages, and peak temperatures (during the burn), and burn severities and unburned refugia (post-burn) for paired morning and afternoon prescribed burns at each of ten prairie sites throughout the south Puget Sound in 2014.
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This working paper describes how Air Resource Advisors use smoke modeling and monitoring tools to build a toolkit for fire managers and to improve public communication.