Shrub–steppe

Transcription

A lot of people that live in the west think sagebrush is ubiquitous, it's widespread. Everywhere they travel they see it. They go across northern Nevada, or southern Idaho, or eastern Oregon. You see sagebrush as far as you can see. So at first glance, when you think of sagebrush, it seems like a really mundane plant. We have it everywhere. It's all over the western United States, and it does not seem that important, or that valuable. But when you start looking at the habitat, the sagebrush habitat, it's more than just sagebrush, and it encompasses this complex system of interaction between sagebrush, the grasses, the plants, the shrubs, and trees. A lot of people don't know what they are missing, because what they don't get, is that these are incredibly rich, productive systems. Or they can be, anyway, but unfortunately there is very, very little of that left. You know, we have impacted sagebrush to such an extent over the last century and a half, through our settlement patterns, our development, our farming, our grazing... Bringing in fire. Bringing in species, you know, novel species from other parts of the world, like cheatgrass. One of the problems that we're faced with here is the encroachment of invasive species. And when you look across this habitat, it seems on its face very healthy. But a lot of the species that you're seeing here just don't belong here. or haven't traditionally been here. They've been brought in by humans. They've been brought in by cattle and sheep. They've been brought in by other livestock, or they've just been and given an opportunity to grow because of the changes that we've made to the natural processes here. Some examples are cheatgrass. If you look back in some of these areas and you see wide expanses of cheatgrass or medusahead grass. So for the Upper Columbia Basin Inventory and Monitoring Network, you know, it was an obvious community to pay attention to. Because so much is gone, and yet it is so huge, and it supports so many different kinds of life forms. Well, we're monitoring in these sagebrush steppe ecosystems to get information on trends over time, in the important species. Both the native and the non-native species. And by comparing both native and non-native species in the community, we get insight into... really...the health of the systems. We try and get this monitoring information back into the hands of park managers as quickly as possible, so that they are able to make informed decisions about where they should be restoring (sagebrush habitat). Where are the areas of these parks that are in really good shape? That have sort of been able to maintain the characteristic components. The species, the processes, and things like that, that we really want to try to preserve and protect over time. And then, where are the problem areas? This is a patch of medusahead (grass) that I found maybe two years ago. I'm not sure when it came here, but I hadn't noticed it before. When these things dry out, they will float in the wind and you'll see them bouncing along the surface of the ground, and the park is just over the hill. As it accumulates, you get this biomass that is... just thick. That nothing seems to penetrate. So that you end up with a monoculture. I mean, in here we still have a few forbs that are coming out. Eventually, this will be so thick with medusahead, that there is nothing here but medusahead. And as a result of that, you just lose all sorts of plant species, plus all of the all of the insect species, all the other species depend upon this...this natural ecotype. And that's the scary part with medusahead. In the old days, it was simple. You tried to keep it exactly the way it was when European man first saw it. But the difficulties in doing that were so overwhelming, that rather than give up, we changed that...those goal posts a little bit. And the whole idea I think now of building a... or maintaining an ecosystem and promoting an ecosystem that is resilient, is beginning to become the dominant theme. And I think rightly so. Resilience is a really important concept. It gets at this idea of the ability of these landscapes to recover after disturbances like fire and drought for example. We're trying to get insight into the resilience of these landscapes. One of the biggest challenges facing the National Park Service, right now, and many years into the future, is going to be our changing climate. It's changing at a rate that is unprecedented in the historical record, but also the fossil record, and the prehistoric record. How ready are some of these ecosystems? How able are these ecosystems to adapt to drastic changes that are happening very quickly? So when we think about resilience, we're thinking about ways that we can manage and assist the ecosystem to handle dramatic changes. The monitoring is quite complex, because the systems that you are trying to monitor are quite complex. And so, when you think about this, it's... an ecosystem is not just a single plant like this bluebunch wheatgrass, or this sagebrush behind me. It's a variety of plants, and soils, and topographies, and elevations. And so, how do you look at that complexity, and how do you monitor effectively with a pretty straightforward thing? And it was a tough challenge. What I go out and do, is I use a square meter plot, that I set out, and within that plot I measure the cover of these important components. ...the sagebrush, other principal shrubs, the native bunch grasses, the non-native invasive grasses. We really look at some of just the key factors in sagebrush steppe. There will be teams that will go on for years. You know, the idea of this monitoring, is that it is going to last for decades, decades, and decades. The more we understand the resources that we're trying to protect through a program like the Inventory and Monitoring Network. It enables us to not only understand better why we preserve these places, but will enable us to continue to protect and preserve them for future generations. Places like national parks, to me...it's a travesty to lose them. I mean, we just have so few examples of them. If we can maintain these big native bunch grasses, and the sagebrushes, where they naturally occur... It takes a vision that goes out over decades or centuries, and it takes people to make it happen. Then there's the hope That we can actually maintain some of these characteristic aspects of this community. I'm really, really pleased that the (National) Park Service has developed this Inventory and Monitoring Program, and I'm really pleased at they're investing people and money into doing this.