Mike Pellant

The Sagebrush Steppe Treatment Evaluation Project (SageSTEP): a test of state-and-transition theory

The Sagebrush Steppe Treatment Evaluation Project (SageSTEP) is a comprehensive, integrated, long-term study that evaluates the ecological effects of fire and fire surrogate treatments designed to reduce fuel and to restore sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) communities of the Great Basin and surrounding areas. SageSTEP has several features that make it ideal for testing hypotheses from state-and-transition theory: it is long-term, experimental, multisite, and multivariate, and treatments are applied across condition gradients, allowing for potential identification of biotic thresholds. The project will determine the conditions under which sagebrush steppe ecological communities recover on their own following fuel treatment versus the communities crossing ecological thresholds, which requires expensive active restoration.

A Collaborative Program to Provide Native Plant Materials for the Great Basin

T he Great Basin as de ned on a oristic ba- sis 1 includes the hydrographic Great Basin plus the Owyhee Uplands and Snake River Plain of southern Idaho (Fig. 1). The region encom- passes about 60 million ha, of which more than two-thirds are publicly owned. Vegetation ranges from salt desert and sagebrush shrublands in the basins to conifer forests in the more than 200 mountain ranges. Historic land management opened the environment to invasion by exotic annual grasses, primarily cheatgrass ( Bromus tectorum ). Resulting changes in re regimes and more recent human disturbances such as en- ergy development, mining, and recreation have combined to increase the spread of annual and perennial exotics, deplete native seed banks, simplify community structure and species associations, and reduce landscape patchiness. Ecosystem resilience declines with disruption of ecological functions such as snow or water catchment, reduction of wind veloc- ity, and nutrient cycling. West and Young 2 described in detail the plant communities and management issues in the Great Basin and suggested that development of more effective and economical revegetation techniques should be a research pri- ority, especially for the more arid regions.xa0 DOI: 10.2458/azu_rangelands_v34i4_shaw

A field guide for rapid assessment of post-wildfire recovery potential in sagebrush and pinon-juniper ecosystems in the Great Basin: Evaluating resilience to disturbance and resistance to invasive annual grasses and predicting vegetation response

This field guide provides a framework for rapidly evaluating post-fire resilience to disturbance, or recovery potential, and resistance to invasive annual grasses, and for determining the need and suitability of the burned area for seeding. The framework identifies six primary components that largely determine resilience to disturbance, resistance to invasive grasses, and potential successional pathways following wildfire, as well as the information sources and tools needed to evaluate each component. The components are: (1) characteristics of the ecological site; (2) vegetation composition and structure prior to the wildfire; (3) fire severity; (4) post-wildfire weather; (5) post-wildfire management, especially grazing; and (6) monitoring and adaptive management. The tools provided are: (1) a conceptual model of the key components that largely determine resilience to disturbance and resistance to invasive annual grasses of the burn area, (2) a guide to evaluate post-wildfire severity, (3) indicators to estimate pre-wildfire plant composition and structure if not known, and (4) an evaluation score sheet to rate an area’s potential post-wildfire resilience to disturbance, resistance to invasive annual grasses and, thus, the need for seeding and probability of success.