Treatment Options in Sagebrush Ecosystems of the Great Basin

Описание: Sydney Turner is an OSU graduate student whose research focuses on fire ecology in sagebrush ecosystems, with an emphasis on how plant physiology and community arrangements influence fire behavior. The goal of her work is to improve our predictions of fire behavior and to support sagebrush ecosystem conservation.

Dr. Sofia Koutzoukis is a rangeland ecologist who is interested in any question that centers around restoration and resilience in rangelands in the Intermountain West. As a postdoctoral researcher, she is currently studying community change, fire behavior, and management options to mitigate degradation and restore sagebrush ecosystems experiencing pinyon-juniper expansion in the Great Basin.

The presenters will describe how the spread of highly flammable invasive grasses and expansion of pinyon and junipers across the Intermountain West has altered the fire regimes of sagebrush dominated ecosystems, threatening the functioning and integrity of these systems as well as the efficacy of wildland firefighting operations. Changing community composition affects fire behavior both bottom-up via changes in combustion and fire spread and top-down through changing management paradigms that match actions to ecological settings to promote favorable outcomes.

Among the fundamental drivers of extreme fire behavior is the interaction between the woody sagebrush canopy and the herbaceous understory. However, the climate conditions and spatial arrangements of these fuel types that promote extreme fire spreads remain largely unknown. To address this gap, we are conducting combustion experiments to examine how fuel moisture and grass invasion affects sagebrush canopy flammability to inform more effective wildfire management in sagebrush ecosystems. Management actions, via woody and herbaceous fuel reductions, must match abiotic and biotic ecosystem conditions to reduce fuels without promoting further invasion. By quantifying change in vegetation cover and mapping where treatment options would be likely to have favorable outcomes, we can facilitate ongoing planning in high priority landscapes. Managing fuels and fire behavior requires ongoing investigation to all processes, both ecological and management-centered, that contribute to fire spread and behavior.