Invasive plants are often associated with greater productivity and soil nutrient availabilities, but whether invasive plants with dissimilar traits change decomposer communities and decomposition rates in consistent ways is little known. We compared decomposition rates and the fungal and bacterial communities associated with the litter of three problematic invaders in intermountain grasslands; ...

Invasive species can change selective pressures on native plants by altering biotic and abiotic conditions in invaded habitats. Although invasions can lead to native species extirpation, they may also induce rapid evolutionary changes in remnant native plants. We investigated whether adult plants of five native perennial grasses exhibited trait shifts consistent with evolution in response to in...

How plant populations, communities, and ecosystems respond to climate change is a critical focus in ecology today. The responses of introduced species may be especially rapid. Current models that incorporate temperature and precipitation suggest that future Bromus tectorum invasion risk is low for the Colorado Plateau. With a field warming experiment at two sites in southeastern Utah, we tested...

National Parks are hallmarks of ecosystem preservation in the United States. The introduction of alien invasive plant species threatens protection of these areas. Bromus tectorum L. (commonly called downy brome or cheatgrass), which is found in Rocky Mountain National Park (hereafter, the Park), Colorado, USA, has been implicated in early spring competition with native grasses, decreased soil n...

An understanding of land use/land cover change at local, regional, and global scales is important in an increasingly human-dominated biosphere. Here, we report on an under-appreciated complexity in the analysis of land cover change important in arid and semi-arid environments. In these environments, some land cover types show a high degree of inter-annual variability in productivity. In this st...

The boundary for the Wyoming Basins Ecoregional Assessment (WBEA) was largely determined by the co-occurrence of some of the largest tracts of intact sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) remaining in the western United States with areas of increasing resource extraction. The WBEA area includes two ecoregions in their entirety, Wyoming Basins and Utah-Wyoming Rocky Mountains, and portions of two others (S...

Invasive plants have tremendous potential to enrich native food webs by subsidizing net primary productivity. Here, we explored how a potential food subsidy, seeds produced by the aggressive invader cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum), is utilized by an important guild of native consumers--granivorous small mammals--in the Great Basin Desert, USA. In a series of field experiments we examined 1) how ch...

Many exotic annual grasses are believed to increase wildfire frequency to the detriment of native vegetation by increasing fine fuels and thus, creating a grass-fire cycle. However, information on differences in fuel characteristics between invaded and non-invaded plant communities is lacking, or is basedmainly on speculation and anecdotal evidence. We compared fuel biomass, cover, continuity a...