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Webinar recording.
This webinar features insights and lessons from three communities in Colorado —the City of Colorado Springs, Eagle County, and Ouray County— and their successful approaches to local adoption and enforcement of wildfire regulations. This webinar is based on a new report from the Community Wildfire Planning Center, Regulating the Wildland-Urban Interface in Colorado.
Webinar recording.
This presentation discusses the following topics as they relate to rangelands:
- Resistance and Resilience are commonly used terms in discussions about agriculture and preparing for the future.
- Provide a common understanding of these terms as they apply to the ecology of grazed systems.
- Relationships between ecological resistance and resilience, disturbances, and ecological processes will be discussed.
Webinar recording.
This presentation discusses a pilot project in partnership with the BC Cattlemen’s Association and the Province of British Columbia that uses cattle grazing to reduce wildfire risk in wildland-urban interface areas. Amanda Miller, of Palouse Rangeland Consulting is engaged as the liaison, coordinator, and researcher for the development, pilot, and testing of livestock use models for fine fuel management.
Webinar recording.
This presentation shares results from a recent region-wide field survey of sagebrush rangelands in Oregon and Idaho, where we examined drivers of annual grass invasion at local and regional scales, and how grazing intensity at different scales can interact with environmental determinants of vegetation.
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No combinations of salvage intensity and distribution from among the scenarios we explored were able to fully mitigate the negative effect on the bird community; however, the magnitude of declines in abundance and diversity was smaller than expected, and the majority of the species analyzed had a non-significant response. We recommend targeting salvage activities in the Sierra Nevada to those locations where snags pose a safety issue or where reforestation is most needed to conserve this fire-adapted bird community.
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Prebunking and debunking misinformation are first steps toward ensuring that policy makers, journalists, judges, members of the public, and elected officials are skeptical of weakly supported scientific information, which can hinder effective wildfire management.
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Cows were fitted with VF collars (calves not collared) that use Global Positioning System positioning to contain cattle inside fuel break boundaries and record animal locations at 5-min intervals. End-of-trial forage utilization was 48.5% ± 3.7% and 5.5% ± 0.7% for areas inside and outside of the fuel break, respectively. Daily percentage of cattle locations inside the fuel break was initially > 94% but declined to approximately 75% by the end of the trial. Percentage daily locations of dry cows and cow/calf pairs inside the fuel break was 98.5% ± 0.5% and 80.6% ± 1.1%, respectively (P < 0.001). Our data suggest virtual fencing can be a highly effective method of concentrating grazing to reduce herbaceous fuel biomass within linear fuel breaks. Efficacy of this method could be substantially impacted by use of dry versus cow/calf pairs.
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It is clear that the state of knowledge based on empirical evidence is at its infancy. This is likely because of the vast challenges associated with designing and implementing sampling designs that account for combinations of spatial and temporal configurations prior to wildfire occurrence. We also suspect part of the reason empirical evidence is lacking is because the distinction between site-level and landscape-level effects is not well recognized in the literature. All papers used the term landscape, but rarely defined the landscape, and some specified identifying landscape-level effects that were truly site-level effects. Future research needs to develop innovative ways to interpret the role of fuel treatments at the landscape level to provide insight on strategic designs and approaches to maximize fuel treatment effectiveness.
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Seeds were captured across the range of tested dispersal distances, up to a maximum distance of 26 m from seed-source plants, although dispersal to the furthest traps was variable. Seed dispersal was better explained by transect heterogeneity than by patch or site heterogeneity (transects were nested within patch within site). The number of seeds captured varied from a modelled mean of ~13 m -2 adjacent to patches of seed-producing plants, to nearly none at 10 m from patches, standardized over a 49-day period. Maximum seed-dispersal distances on average were estimated to be 16-m according to a novel modelling approach using a “latent” dispersal distance based on seed trapping heights.