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This guide was written for anyone interested in learning more about sagebrush species and habitats. It provides descriptions of some of the remarkably diverse sagebrush communities in western North America. It gives identifying characteristics and range maps of 18 species of sagebrush.
Background: Geo-fencing provides some unique advantages over conventional fencing approaches. This is especially true when we consider the devastation to fencing, and other rangeland infrastructure, caused by wildfires. Geo-fencing is increasingly used with public land grazing leases, but the cost-effectiveness of geo-fencing and common challenges are not well understood. Issues such as cost-effectiveness, environmental concerns, animal welfare, and system efficacy remain unclear.
In this Summit, we provide a forum for producers, managers, and USDA Forest Service agency leadership to share their insights, successes, and failures while answering questions in the process. Geo-fencing may have a significant role to play in the future of public land management. In this Summit, we provide a backdrop against which we can come to some common understanding of what the technology affords including the considerations needed prior to implementation.
Summit Scope & Components: The objective is to enable Summit participants to learn from the real-world experience provided by managers, agency leaders, and producers. In this Summit, we discuss geo-fencing through a series of coupled 20-minute presentations followed by a 30-minute live question-and-answer session. In this manner, we aim to engage participants from a wide range of experiences and disciplines.
Deliverables & Benefits:
- The meeting itself. It provides an important means of information exchange where we can all learn from each other.
- Recorded 20-minute presentations that can be revisited remotely anytime.
- Identification of new partnerships between producers, managers, and researchers to foster more effective land management strategies to be developed across more regions.
View field guide.
This field guide is designed to help agricultural producers, land managers, homeowners, recreationists, and others to identify the noxious weeds of Nevada. All weeds listed by Nevada state law (as of 2010) are included, each with a brief description, color photographs, and recommendations for control.
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This field guide is designed to help identify some of the common noxious and invasive weed species that are currently threatening Utah and have been identified on Utah’s state weed list.
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On a dry winter morning between Christmas and New Year’s Eve 2021, the communities in Boulder County braced for the wind. The area lies at the base of the Front Range, made up of flat-topped mesas and open grasslands where creek bottoms are lined with cottonwood trees. On the outskirts of the communities are scattered homes and ranchettes. Farther east are established neighborhoods with mature landscaping and newer subdivisions sparsely planted with shrubs and ornamental hardwoods. Green corridors and trails run through the area.
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The magnitude of impact of tree encroachment on rangeland loss is similar to conversion to cropland, another well-known and primary mechanism of rangeland loss in the US Prioritizing conservation efforts to prevent tree encroachment can bolster ecosystem and economic sustainability, particularly among privately-owned lands threatened by land-use conversion.
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Forest biological disturbance agents (BDAs) are insects, pathogens, and parasitic plants that affect tree decline, mortality, and forest ecosystems processes. BDAs are commonly thought to increase the likelihood and severity of fire by converting live standing trees to more flammable, dead and downed fuel. However, recent research indicates that BDAs do not necessarily increase, and can reduce, the likelihood or severity of fire. This has led to confusion regarding the role of BDAs in influencing fuels and fire in fire-prone western United States forests. Here, we review the existing literature on BDAs and their effects on fuels and fire in the western US and develop a conceptual framework to better understand the complex relationships between BDAs, fuels and fire. We ask: 1) What are the major BDA groups in western US forests that affect fuels? and 2) How do BDA-affected fuels influence fire risk and outcomes? The conceptual framework is rooted in the spatiotemporal aspects of BDA life histories, which drive forest impacts, fuel characteristics and if ignited, fire outcomes. Life histories vary among BDAs from episodic, landscape-scale outbreaks (bark beetles, defoliators), to chronic, localized disturbance effects (dwarf mistletoes, root rots). Generally, BDAs convert aboveground live biomass to dead biomass, decreasing canopy fuels and increasing surface fuels. However, the rate of conversion varies with time-since-event and among BDAs and forest types, resulting in a wide range of effects on the amount of dead fuels at any given time and place, which interacts with the structure and composition of the stand before and subsequent to BDA events. A major influence on fuels may be that BDAs have emerged as dominant agents of forest heterogeneity creation. Because BDAs play complex roles in fuels and fire heterogeneity across the western US which are further complicated by interactions with climate change, drought, and forest management (fire suppression), their impacts on fuels, fire and ecological consequences cannot be categorized simply as positive or negative but need to be evaluated within the context of BDA life histories and ecosystem dynamics.
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Soil temperature extremes are not uncommon when woody fuels are ignited in prescribed burns or wildfires. Whether this leads to substantial loss of soil organic matter or microbial life is unclear. We created a soil heat gradient by burning four levels of masticated woody fuels (0, 34, 101, and 169 Mg ha−1) to determine if heat thresholds produce abrupt changes in soil C, N, microbial biomass, or fungal hyphae. Twenty-four burns were conducted with masticated fuels overlaying a clay loam soil equilibrated at either 4 or 25% volumetric soil water content. Maximum temperatures ranged from 40 to 450 °C depending on fuel load and soil moisture content, with heat duration (>60 °C) as great as 22 h. Moist soil quenched temperatures two- to threefold compared with dry soil at comparable fuel loads. A slight, gradual decline in total C and N was found with increasing temperature and heat duration, reaching a maximum loss of 14–18% of the total at the highest heat load. Available NH4 increased linearly starting at 150–175 °C and reached a maximum 15-fold increase relative to unburned soil by 450 °C. Nitrification (30 d post-fire) was low regardless of treatment and was essentially eliminated at the highest temperatures. Microbial biomass declined curvilinearly with increased heating, approaching 65% loss compared with unburned soil, and was most rapid in moist soil once temperatures exceeded 60–70 °C. Ultimately, we found no evidence of abrupt heat thresholds for these common soil properties. Instead, property changes followed a slightly declining trajectory (soil C, N, NO3, fungal hyphae) or a steady incremental increase (NH4) or decrease (microbial biomass).
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This year’s annual conference will be in Boise, ID.
Webinar registration.
The good, bad, and ugly of fire and wildlife – roasty toasty critters or promoting sustainable habitat for expanding and healthy wildlife populations? Let’s discuss the pros and cons of fire on wildlife. How is the lack of fire at the necessary scale, frequency, intensity/severity, and seasonality one of the greatest threats to wildlife in fire-dependent ecosystems?