Fire and Invasive Annual Grasses in Western Ecosystem

A project funded by the Joint Fire Science Program

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General Objectives

• Examine interactions between fire, soil, nutrients, and invasive grass productivity over a range of low-nutrient ecosystems currently dominated or threatened by invasive annual grasses in Western North America
• Find common factors driving the fire/annual grass cycle in these ecosystems with the goal of producing generalizations widely applicable beyond the ecosystems under study
• Investigate and document the process by which invasive plant species are inhibited, stimulated, and/or proliferated by fire
• Determine which ecosystems or vegetation types are most susceptible to invasion following fire
• Observe the effects of treatments by which invasive plants can be controlled

Fire Related Objectives

• Document wildfire behavior, fuel characteristics, and other data that can be used by fire behavior analysts to modify existing model algorithms to more accurately represent observed wildfire behavior in arid and semi-arid shrubland fuels
• Document horizontal and vertical temperature profiles near the soil surface
• Document differences between pre- and postfire soil nutrient availability and seedbank viability
• Develop models relating patterns of soil heating to postfire patterns of nutrient availability and seedbank viability
• Test hypotheses that information derived from lab and field experiments can be used to predict results from wildfires
• Develop recommendations for extrapolating the results of prescribed or experimental fires to wildfire situations, and for inferring postfire effects using fire behavior data
• Develop recommendations for incorporating fire behavior, fuels and NRCS (National Resources Conservation Service) soils survey data into postfire restoration plans