Vegetation Responses to Prescribed Burning of Grazed Shortgrass Steppe

River Ecosystem Response to Prescribed Vegetation Burning on Blanket peatland

Catchment-scale land-use change is recognised as a major threat to aquatic biodiversity and ecosystem functioning globally. In the UK uplands rotational vegetation burning is practised widely to boost production of recreational game birds, and while some recent studies have suggested burning can alter river water quality there has been minimal attention paid to effects on aquatic biota. We stud...

Community responses of arthropods to a range of traditional and manipulated grazing in shortgrass steppe.

Responses of plants to grazing are better understood, and more predictable, than those of consumers in North American grasslands. In 2003, we began a large-scale, replicated experiment that examined the effects of grazing on three important arthropod groups-beetles, spiders, and grasshoppers-in shortgrass steppe of north-central Colorado. We investigated whether modifications of the intensity a...

Restoration of mountain big sagebrush steppe following prescribed burning to control western juniper.

Western juniper (Juniperus occidentalis ssp. occidentalis Hook) encroachment into mountain big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata spp. vaseyana (Rydb.) Beetle) steppe has reduced livestock forage production, increased erosion risk, and degraded sagebrush-associated wildlife habitat. Western juniper has been successfully controlled with partial cutting followed by prescribed burning the next fall, ...

Considerations for Prescribed Burning

Does fall prescribed burning Artemisia tridentata steppe promote invasion or resistance to invasion after a recovery period?

Artemisia tridentata ssp. wyomingensis (Beetle & A. Young) S.L. Welsh-bunchgrass communities were used to analyze the influence of disturbances on invasibility after a recovery period. These communities evolved with periodic fires shifting dominance from shrubs to herbaceous species. However, fire can facilitate Bromus tectorum L. invasion of these plant communities. We evaluated the invasibili...