Prescribed Fire Effects on Plant Communities in Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep Habitat PDF Download

Author: Eric S. Petterson
Publisher:
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Category : Bighorn sheep
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Author:
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Category : Fire ecology
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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A compilation of 11 papers in which authorities discuss the impacts of fire on wildlife habitat and wildlife populations. Presentations cover bobwhite quail, nongame birds, white-tailed deer, bighorn and Stone's sheep; and the response to burning of curlleaf cercocarpus, aspen, evergreen ceanothus, and antelope bitterbrush.

Author: Thomas J. Stohlgren
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195172337
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Here is a thorough presentation and critique of the sampling approaches, designs and field techniques for measuring plant diversity. Ecologists interested in assessing landscapes and ecosystems must measure biomass, cover, and the density or frequency of various key species. Recently, sampling designs for measuring species richness and diversity, patterns of plant diversity, species-environment relationships, and species distributions have become finer-grained, as it has become increasingly important to accurately map and assess rare species for conservation. This book lays out the range of current methods for mapping and measuring species diversity, for field ecologists, resource managers, conservation biologists, and students, as a tool kit for future field measurements of plant diversity.

Author:
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Category : Animal ecology
Languages : en
Pages : 92

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Author: Peter F. Ffolliott
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Category : Forest litter
Languages : en
Pages : 4

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Author:
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Category : Forests and forestry
Languages : en
Pages : 760

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Author:
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Category : Forests and forestry
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Author: Robert E. Keane
Publisher:
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Category : Fire ecology
Languages : en
Pages : 32

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The health of many Rocky Mountain ecosystems is in decline because of the policy of excluding fire in the management of these ecosystems. Fire exclusion has actually made it more difficult to fight fires, and this poses greater risks to the people who fight fires and for those who live in and around Rocky Mountain forests and rangelands. This paper discusses the extent of fire exclusion in the Rocky Mountains, then details the diverse and cascading effects of suppressing fires in the Rocky Mountain landscape by spatial scale, characteristic, and vegetation type. Also discussed are the varied effects of fire exclusion on some important, keystone ecosystems and human concerns.

Author: Whitney L. Behr
Publisher:
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Grasslands can support high levels of biodiversity and provide numerous ecosystem services, but they have been widely degraded, often via loss of natural disturbance regimes. North American grasslands were once created and maintained by fire. In some cases, fire has been more important than climate in determining the distribution and extent of grasslands. Conservation of the biodiversity harbored by grasslands relies, in part, on ecological restoration of these habitats and the fire regimes that historically maintained them. In this dissertation, I examined the effects of prescribed fire on grassland plant species and plant communities of the southern Great Plains in the short-term (up to two years after fire) and longer-term (twelve years after fire). Cool-season prescribed burns (those conducted in January – March) were not sufficient to shift overall plant community composition (e.g., increase richness of native plant species or reduce cover of the invasive grass Bothriochloa ischaemum) in 10 sites distributed from central Texas to southern Oklahoma (Chapter 2). However, these fires did have measurable effects on eight individual forb species in the same sites (Chapter 3). In general, the eight forb species studied individually responded to the winter fire individualistically, but all three annual species increased their floral displays (flowers/m2) in the burned plots in the short term. Forb species that increased their floral display in burned areas did so via increased plant biomass (grams of dry aboveground biomass) or plant density (plants/m2). We found little evidence that these forb species shifted their resource allocation towards reproduction. In a separate study (Chapter 4), a prescribed fire conducted in July was sufficient to shift plant community composition in the short term, mostly by reducing the cover of the invasive grass B. ischaemum and increasing native species richness; the latter effect was likely the result of reducing B. ischaemum. In the same study, only the increases in native grass cover and richness were still detectable twelve years after the fire. Perhaps due to two additional cool-season fires across the entire site, B. ischaemum cover remained low twelve years after the fire in burned plots but unexpectedly had also decreased in unburned plots. The results from all three chapters supported our expectation that summer fires would be more effective than cool-season fires in changing the plant community composition, including controlling the invasive grass B. ischaemum. Interestingly, forb species were highly individualistic, from differences in their abundances among sites in the multi-site study (Chapter 3) to differences in their responses to fire (Chapter 4). These findings support conducting prescribed fires in summer months to control invasive grasses and to increase native plant species richness, and consequently conserve the biodiversity supported by grasslands in this region

Author:
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Category : Forests and forestry
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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