Rangeland Restoration in the Great Basin

Dr. Charlie Clements leads the Great Basin Rangeland Research Unit of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research Service, where he conducts research on the restoration of ecologically threatened rangelands. He and his team aim to conserve and enhance sustainable agricultural production, natural resources and communities. He also explores science-based solutions to reduce the spread of harmful invasive species in the region, especially cheatgrass (also called brome.)

Relevant links: Check out this video produced by the USDA-ARS, where Charlie talks more about stopping the spread of cheatgrass, and why it’s important.

Cheating Cheatgrass video

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Transcript

Sarah: Welcome to Come Rain or Shine podcast of the USGS Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center, or Southwest CASC 

Emile: and Ecoimpact Solutions. I'm Emile Elias, founder of Ecoimpact Solutions. 

Sarah: And I'm Sarah LeRoy, research coordinator for the Southwest CASC. Here we highlight stories to share the most recent advances in science, weather, and climate adaptation and innovative practices to support resilient landscapes and communities.

Emile: We believe that sharing some of the most innovative forward thinking and creative scientific research and adaptation solutions will strengthen our collective ability to respond to even the most challenging impacts of climate change in one of the hottest and driest regions of the world.

Sarah: The contents of this podcast are for informational purposes only, and should not be interpreted as endorsement for any of the products, technologies, or strategies discussed. 

Emile: We are so happy to be back. It's been eight months since our last episode. We're thrilled to be talking today with Dr. Charlie Clements about Rangeland restoration in the Great Basin. Charlie leads the Great Basin Rangeland research unit of the USDA Agricultural Research Service in Reno, Nevada. The mission of the unit is to conduct research providing innovative science-based solutions to restore ecologically threatened Great Basin and Mojave Rangelands, and conserve and enhance sustainable agricultural production, natural resources and communities.

Today we're gonna talk about cheatgrass or Brome, and how it impacts the Great Basin, and some of the solutions being tested and expanded by Charlie and his research team. So first, for our listeners who aren't necessarily familiar with the Great Basin, can you describe the region? 

Charlie: Yeah. So the Great Basin, if you were just to put a delineation around it, takes up the vast majority of Nevada, much of Utah.

It also goes into California. Up into Oregon, into Idaho, and it also reaches into Wyoming. So the Great Basin has no outlets to the ocean. The environment is arid, very arid. The climate here, so the majority of our habitat is Wyoming, big sagebrush plant communities in a seven to nine inch precipitation zone.

Our second largest plant community is the Salt Desert Shrubs, which is very arid as well. It's less than seven inch precip. Basically 80% in Nevada doesn't even get 10 inches of precip. This makes it very difficult, as you can imagine, to try to revegetation in arid environments. 

Emile: Today we're talking about Cheatgrass, and so I'm hoping you can tell us a little bit more about Cheatgrass. What is it and why it might be a challenge in the Great Basin?

Charlie: So, cheatgrass is an accidentally introduced annual invasive grass from Eurasia first identified in Pennsylvania in the late 1880s. It came in contaminated wheat and grains. It kind of went from farm to farm through, you know, sharing equipment, but it didn't really persist there.

It sure found its way in the Great Basin. So by 1902 here in Reno on the railways, it was first identified, but by 1935, it had spread throughout our Wyoming big sagebrush plant communities. So meaning our largest plant community got invaded by Cheatgrass. By early 1980s, it had made its way into the salt desert shrub plant community, which is our second largest of course.

You know, early on when we looked at this invasion, it really resulted in truncating succession of our perennial species. And so big sagebrush plant communities were all of a sudden converted to annual grasslands. So we actually went and looked at a hundred sites from Northeast California across Nevada into western Utah, and only one site didn't have Cheatgrass in the seed bank.

So that tells you just how widespread it is. 

Emile: Why is it so good that colonizing and, and surviving and even thriving in the Great Basin when it maybe didn't do so well in other ecosystems? 

Charlie: So coming from the parts of Eurasia, it really is adapted to these arid environments. But it also is adapted to, to grazing.

It historically was grazed. So this species produces copious amounts of seed anywhere from a few hundred to up to four to 5,000 per plant. So when we did those hundred sites, we averaged 252 cheatgrass seeds per square foot. And so that just tells you that when a disturbance occurs, whether it's a fire, a drought, anything that, you know, takes the plant community out, it's in the seed bank mining the site so it can as little as four cheatgrass plants per square foot, from pioneer researchers from this unit has shown that that can outcompete our most competitive perennial species. So we know that this very competitive annual grass out competes our perennial species at the seedling stage. 

Sarah: Thanks, Charlie, for that background on cheatgrass. Because I've heard of Cheatgrass in the region and how important it is for the region, but not the background of how it got there. And so that's very interesting to hear about. I'm wondering if you want to expand anymore on the relationship between cheatgrass and native plants. You've touched on this, but is there any more to say in that space? 

Charlie: Yeah, so the ability of cheatgrass seed to acquire dormancy allows it to build these persistent seed banks.

So cheatgrass germinates at a wide range of constant and alternating temperatures throughout the Great Basin region. So it can germinate in the fall, in the winter, in the spring, and in some cases, even in the summer. That's not what our native perennial species like Blue Bunch wheatgrass, cruel tell, or bluegrasses.

They, they don't have that opportunity, but by acquiring this dormancy, like I said, they build this seed bank and then at the seeding stage, they outcompete. That's where we have to do in, and we will get into this. We'll have to do this innovative, effective, and efficient weed control to get that seed bank down so that our perennial native perennial species have a chance to merge, establish, and persist at a site.

Sarah: Great. Thanks. And so thinking about the impacts of beyond outcompeting native plants, and I'm thinking about wildfire here. So how has Cheatgrass changed the wildfire regime in the Great Basin? 

Charlie: So historically our researchers will tell you that in the Wyoming Big Sagebrush Plant community historically, those fires were about every 60 to 110 years. In our salt desert shrub communities fire was nearly nonexistent 'cause there's no fuel to take care of those fires. So when you have these reoccurring wildfires now that we estimate in some cases every five to 10 years, it is simply too short of a period of time to let native, deeper parental grasses back into the community, let alone those critical shrub species that we need for wildlife. 

So this frequency of wildfire has been a significant impact. So with each passing year and wildfire season, we're seeing remaining islands that haven't burned, burn up again and again and again.

So now we're losing wildlife habitat. We're losing sustainable agriculture practices, like grazing, and we're losing the function of perennial plant communities. So this conversion from big sage brush bunch grass to annual grass dominated systems has really caused catastrophic impacts throughout the Great Basin.

Sarah: Thinking beyond fire, are there some other ecosystem impacts of cheat grass in the Great Basin? 

Charlie: So fire is the catalyst, but you've gotta remember we're in a very arid environment. So drought also plays a role, but it is the competitive nature of cheatgrass that I touched on that reduces the ability of parental plant species to establish.

And that is what is necessary for the ecosystem function is to get these perennial  species back into an environment. I'm gonna give you an example. So we aged antelope bitterbrush shrubs. Okay. So antelope bitterbrush is a critical browse  species in the Western, um, states. We aged those and we saw a flush of about every 30 years this species would recruit enough seedlings back into the environment to sustain the population. That was only every 30 years.

We have Blue Bunch Wheatgrass Seedings that date back to the early two-thousands. To this date, they have not recruited new plants. So if Cheatgrass is in the environment, these rare events probably become more rare because the Cheatgrass is out competing those seedings at the seeding stage. So instead of having this recruitment of new seedlings and to sustain that population, we're simply not seeing that.

So management has to come in and assist that. 

Emile: Excellent. Thanks Charlie. And now that we've established some of the problems related to Cheatgrass, let's talk about some of the solutions or innovative options that your unit is testing. So I understand that you use a combination of herbicides and planting to reestablish native vegetation, and so can you talk a little bit about those solutions, how you came up with them and how they're working?

Charlie: Sure. This is actually the exciting part. So anytime you are dealing with a weed species, especially an aggressive species like Cheatgrass, the development of tools to combat those aggressive weeds is a must. So in the case of Cheatgrass and its competitive ability, we focus on decreasing the Cheatgrass seed production as well as existing seed banks.

So I started here in 1988.  As a student I was here about 1985. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, herbicides were not a research tool. They weren't being used. So we had to do a mechanical method, and that was disking. And so we would have a tractor, we'd have a large disk behind it, and we would go into a cheatgrass infested Rangeland.

We would disk the site in late April, early May before the maturity of the seed on the plant. Therefore, we could get rid of that, year seed production, but at the same time, that disc would go down four to five inches. It would take that seed bank that I'm talking about that Cheatgrass builds. It could bury a majority of that down deep to where it really wasn't gonna be a germination emergence problem.

We could reduce that seed bank down to about 72 to 80%. We would fallow that site through the summer, and then that fall we would seed perennial species that were competitive. And also desirable for the site. And so the following spring when the germination was occurring with these perennial species, they were competing with a lot less cheatgrass and that allowed for the establishment and then eventually the persistence of these perennial species on those cheatgrass infested rangelands. 

By the late 1990s they started getting back into herbicides. So historically this research unit was the pioneer for Rangeland research on controlling cheatgrass with herbicides. So Dick Ecker, Jim Young, Ray Evans, they were our pioneer researchers that built this foundation that I work on today, and that really I learned from them.

When we got to the late 1990s, we did have a herbicide called Oust, a pre-emergent soil active herbicide. It was misused on erodible soil in Idaho. So it was taken off that market. Well, at the same time, they were developing Imazapic, which is the most widely known and used herbicide here in the Great Basin for cheatgrass control and it's known as Plateau. So when we would apply this, we had to understand the activity of the herbicide and what the target was. We would apply this herbicide in the fall of the year, like September, prior to effective moisture that would occur on Great Basin Rangelands so that the, the herbicide was in the soil prior to any germination emergence.

The point of this herbicide is that when the seedling, when the seed germinates and the embryonic root comes out. That touches the residue of the herbicide and causes mortality. So you want as much precipitation during this period as possible because you want all this germination. The activity of Imazapic is about a 12 to 15 month period. 

So we would fallow the site for a whole year and then that following fall we would seed. And the reason for that is that, remember I talked about cheatgrass' ability to germinate at all these seasons? Well, by applying this in September we could effectively control Cheatgrass emergence in fall, winter, spring, and early fall the next year, then put our seeded species in the ground. And so when they would emerge in the spring, again, they're not going against all this cheatgrass. Our Imazapic plots average a minimum of 95% control on reducing cheatgrass seed banks. By reducing that, we're also releasing limited resources in the soil, like soil moisture, right?

So when we have a good fallow, we're increasing soil moisture by over 40%. So the seeded species that we use, they now can emerge, establish, and persist. So a good example of this is if we have a control and we seed a species or a seed mix, we're looking at about one perennial grass per meter squared, and that would be good for a control.

But when we use our treatments of pre-emergent herbicide controlling cheatgrass, we're seeing more than six perennial grasses per meter squared, and that is significant because our goal is to reduce the cheatgrass density and reduce the fuels associated with cheatgrass. And these pre-emergent herbicides are effective in doing that, but it is also, as you brought up, the plants, the plant materials, our plant material testing in collaboration with our, with our Utah ARS unit and our folks over in Burns, Oregon, because we're all right here in the Great Basin. By testing these plant materials, these seed mixes, we have the ability to really get good suppression because the best known method at controlling cheat grass is through the establishment of perennial grasses.

So by getting that increase in perennial grasses, we can cut back on that Cheatgrass, we cut back on that fire and that we can let succession take place. Oh, I should bring this up too. We also work with Indaziflam or Rejuvra. It is a newer product on the market. I started working with it back in 2018.

And so this herbicide has an activity of three to four years at least. So if I have a cheatgrass infested habitat, heavily cheatgrass, I'm probably not going to use this product. But if I have a habitat where Cheatgrass is trying to move into like a green strip or a big sagebrush bunch grass plant community that has a lot of residual perennial grasses, this product is very good.

What it does is it comes in controls that cheatgrass for like I said, three, four, maybe even five years. But by taking that Cheatgrass out, you will see in your shrubs, you'll see an increase in leader growth in seed production. In your perennial grasses you will see, instead of grasses drying out in late June and July they're gonna go green into to August.

So what that does is that reduces that wildfire risk 'cause wildfires, you know, instead of being July and August when Cheatgrass was introduced, we got into April through October wildfires. So we're trying to reduce that season and that threat as well. And the Rejuva is an excellent, excellent tool for that.

Emile: Excellent. Thanks. It's really exciting that this is working, that, you know, the herbicides are working and, and allowing for some of the plantings. And I, I'm curious about kinda the extent of the problem, right? The Great Basin is a big area. Cheatgrass is covering a big area, and so I'm wondering if there's a way or how you might prioritize where, where you use this technology in the future, or if you have ideas about attacking the problem with this particular solution.

Charlie: So we do. So how we kind of look at it, we have to prioritize because like you said, we're so far behind. For far too long there's been this argument over the discussion tables of where to apply something, how to do something, and if you have big fire season years, you can't, you can't treat all the acres, right?

So you have to prioritize. So we usually prioritize by, in my case, through my background is wildlife management. So I am comfortable saying that if I can improve wildlife habitat, I can improve sustainable grazing practices. And so working for the Agricultural Research Service, one of our main missions is to improve sustainable agriculture practices.

We select those sites in cooperation with our stakeholders, right? So we're basically federal land here in Nevada. So the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, but a big player in this is in the Nevada Department of Wildlife. They are very active in this. So when we select these sites, one is we would look at, was it a big sagebrush plant community that just burned and it burned hot enough for a long enough period of time that it killed the majority of the cheatgrass seed on the surface as well as in that shallow soil surface. If so, that opens a window to see that site, that immediate fall. That's, that's a good indicator to get back in there. If it was a cheatgrass infested fast moving fire, we know we're gonna have to move into a pre-emergent herbicide, right?

So now we're gonna have to have that more aggressive approach. We select those sites, whether it's a mule deer range, critical sage grass habitat, you know, a grazing resource for the livestock operator. We try to do those so that I call 'em food plots. So when you go out, you seed an area it is for forage, but it's also far resistant so that it acts as a green strip as well.

Emile: Excellent, thanks. And, and you started to, to touch on this, but I wonder if there's any more to talk about. A focus of your research unit is really to improve the ability to predict how rangelands respond to disturbance. And so can you describe that work a bit. 

Charlie: Yeah, so one of the best predictive tools that we use here is soil bioassays.

So when I talked about visiting those a hundred sites, whether the disturbance is prolonged drought, cheatgrass invasion, or it's a recent wildfire, we can do a soil bioassay and tell you what the plants are gonna be. And if it is significant cheatgrass, then we actually know that we have to get aggressive in our weed control.

That is the first predictive thing that we would do. The second predictive would be the potential of the site. So if, if, if I have a wildfire that burns down into Salt Desert Shrub, and goes through Alluvial fan and gets up the slope, I'm gonna focus more on the higher potential sites because those are your indicators of higher success.

We have challenges when we get down into below seven inches of precip. It's just a huge challenge. When we get above that, when we, like I said, when you use that pre-emergent herbicide, you increase that available moisture. That's when that seven to nine can be doable. We do the soil bioassays. We do this with the Bureau Land Management. We do it with the Forest Service, and we also do it with Nevada Department of Wildlife. We have greenhouses here where we go collect those bioassays, bring 'em in here, do our counts, and then we can go site by site saying, yep, this is not doable to see this fall. This is gonna have to take a herbicide, or this, this has an open window right now, we need to take advantage of it.

But that all comes in conjunction with our long-term plant material testing, seed mixes, seed rates, and the methods in which you're, you're seeding. So if you're drill seeding, it's gonna be this rate. If you are broadcasting, you're gonna have to go one and a half to two times that rate. And you, you know, this is where the, all the costs come in.

So when we go, you know, when, when we're dealing with these folks and we're looking at predictive stuff, it's site potential, it's what the invasion's going to be, and it's the plant materials that we can get back into the site. 

Sarah: Thanks, Charlie. So you've given us some good examples of how your federal partners and state partners have been using the research. I'm curious if you also work directly with Rangeland managers at all, and how they use your research if they do. 

Charlie: So, you know, I've been doing this like 37 years. So we build bridges on a weekly basis, to be honest. So whether it is your federal partners, your state partners, or your private sector.

So Nevada Gold is a large player in the State of Nevada. We have a very good working relationship with them. They use our technology. That's a big part of what we do here is technology transfer. They use our technology to go treat their rangelands thousands of acres a year. Because they have, you know, one of their, one ranch is 800,000 acres.

So they have a lot of ranches. We work closely with them, but we also work with wildlife advocate groups, right, because mule deer are the only declining big game species in North America. So when we're working on critical browse species, we work directly with these advocate groups. The ranchers, they're in this office weekly because you know, if you have a wildfire and you are gonna have to be off your grazing allotment for two years, and you're unfortunate enough to have two fires in 10 years, that's 40% loss.

That is not sustainable. That is an economic impact to that rancher, to that community, and to the state. Those are, those are big things. So we work with these stakeholders. I can tell you that when I first started working for the government, I kind of wanted to take that license plate off. Because, you know, uh oh, they don't like me.

But as you build these bridges they become family. So I went to a ranch one time and my wife had me on a diet and, but it was four hours away. And so I just used an excuse, I can't stay for supper, I gotta get home. I'm on this diet. Well, the next time I showed up, his wife made sugar-free pudding for me, so I had to stay.

But it was these partnerships like the Department of Wildlife, you know, I've worked with them for four decades. The progress that they have made in the last 15, 20 years is exciting and they are going to be a force for improvement of rangelands in the state. But they work so good with our federal partners.

That this marriage,  because you know, our job is to improve sustainable agriculture practices. Their job is to protect and enhance wildlife. We can do this together and still meet everybody's goals, but we all have to be in it together. So you can't, there's no islands here, there's no walls built. You, you have to sit down together and work through it.

Emile: Thanks. I, I love that story about the pudding and the collaboration. Right. It's, it's a great story. As you were talking earlier, you mentioned plant materials, and it made me think of some of the conversations we've had in the past with foresters and reforestation, and sometimes it's a challenge is actually to get plants that are needed for a particular location at the, at a time. Is that a similar challenge? Do you run into that as well, or, or is there a different situation here? 

Charlie: No, it's, it's a challenge. So right now Nevada's experiencing two real large fires. One's about 85,000 acres. One's 130,000. But in 1999, Nevada burned. It stayed alone, 1.8 million acres. There's not enough seed out there to do these things.

So our plant material testing is a technology transfer tool to these resource managers of what the best options are. The species that you put in the ground has to have the inherent potential to germinate, emerge, establish, but it also has to persist in that given environment and under the circumstances of Cheatgrass invasion, right?

So if, for example, I want Blue Bunch wheatgrass on my nine to 11 inch zones, maybe there's not enough Blue Bunch wheatgrass out there to seed on all those rangelands. They’re going to start decreasing the seeding rates. I'd rather seed a thousand acres at the proper seeding rate than 3000 acres and reduce the chance of success.

So, we do have to make those hard decisions, but, you know, whether it's a native species or an introduced species, you know, the goal has to go, what are we fighting here? And in this case, it's cheatgrass and cheatgrass invasion. And the associated fuels that cause these wildfires that are so catastrophic that we need to get that perennial grass in there to suppress that cheatgrass so we can at least reduce that wildfire frequency and let succession take place or assist succession in taking place. And that's where our restoration and shrubs have come in and that's where our plant material testing really has provided resource managers with those species that have the highest inherent potential to be successful. 

Sarah: Thanks so much, Charlie. And so now I'm going to, I guess I'm not going to switch gears, but we want to talk about hope. So every, every episode we want to make sure we talk about hope. And I know I was feeling a lot of hope when you were talking about your partnerships, everybody working in tandem together to achieve their own goals but that can be, you know, done in a partnership. But yeah, I just want to ask you, what gives you hope in doing this work or in general?

Charlie: So, you know, I get emotional about this because like I said, you're pushing four decades and I have experienced a lot of frustration when it comes to invasive weed control and the restoration and rehabilitation of Great Basin rangelands. I will say in more recent times I have witnessed a growing movement to focus more on success of a project than focusing on finishing a project. And that's hope, that's, that's big for me. I'm not saying that I don't have these frustrations now, but they're far and few between. The best example I can give you is in 2009 we did a lessons learned tour with A BLM district, and we went to seven different projects and six were failures.

And so by working together, understanding how herbicides work, the inherent potential plant materials, seeding rates, methodologies, all that. We went back and we did another tour in 2019 and with the same district, the same guy in charge. And so we went to six projects and five were successes, and that's why I know hope's alive.

You know, a big part of this is also going to be how you educate the next generation. We use field tours specifically to show success on the ground, but also show failure on the ground. And so if I could think of one thing that would be hopeful is, I was fortunate enough when I went to college to spend a lot of time on field trips with our professors. I'm teaching a class tomorrow because we have to get these students back into the field because that's where it really happens. And that's where I think, I think that's why they went into this area of research or management, is to be in the field. So to take that love of what they want to do and kind of grow it gives me hope that they're going to have the same passions that so many of us have.

Sarah: Okay. Last question for you. What is one thing that you would like people to remember from this podcast episode? 

Charlie: So I would say you gotta remember the many researchers that laid the groundwork to be successful in controlling invasive weeds, as well as restoring and rehabilitating Great Basin rangelands.

When I review papers I’ll often see they don't cite these older researchers that laid this groundwork. Our pioneer researchers really sweat the brow and gave us a lot of insight on what to do and what not to do. And that's very, very important in the success of the future. To learn from the past and take advantage of technologies of today is going to increase your success.

But success is a choice, but so failure is also a choice and it's a responsibility of resource managers to make the best informed decisions to improve the Rangeland rather than further degrading Rangelands because that's really our job here is to improve the resources for everyone. Whether you're birdwatching, whether you're recreationist out off-roading, whether you're a livestock operator, whatever it is, our job is to restore and rehabilitate degraded rangelands, and the best way to do that is to learn from the past, take the technologies of now, but make that choice to be successful. 

Sarah: Well, thank you very much, Charlie. That's a great place to end this episode. Emile and I appreciate you coming to chat with us about Cheatgrass and more importantly Rangeland Restoration in the Great Basin, so thank you. 

Charlie: Thank you guys so much for having me. On behalf of the Great Basin Rangeland Research Unit, we really appreciate you all. 

Sarah: Excellent. Thanks. 

Charlie: Take care.

Emile: Thanks for listening to Come Rain or Shine podcast of the USGS Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center, New Mexico State University, the University of Arizona, and Ecoimpact Solutions. If you liked this podcast, don't forget to rate or review it and subscribe for more great episodes. 

Sarah: A special thanks to our production crew, Reanna Burnett and Lauren White. If you want more information, have any questions for the speakers or would like to offer feedback, please reach out to us via our websites.