RAMPS: Restoration Assessment & Monitoring Program for the Southwest
Science Center Objects
The Restoration Assessment and Monitoring Program for the Southwest (RAMPS) seeks to assist U.S. Department of the Interior and other land management agencies and private partners in developing successful restoration strategies for dryland ecosystems of the southwestern United States. Invasive species, drought, habitat loss, fire, urban expansion, and other disturbances have degraded southwestern ecosystems. In water-limited regions, restoration can be difficult and costly. These growing problems often cross administrative boundaries, requiring people to proactively work together. In response, RAMPS has created an inter-disciplinary network of scientists, land managers, and practitioners coordinated at the Southwest Biological Science Center that use service-delivery models to improve restoration strategies and outcomes.
Rangelands of the desert Southwest can become degraded and lose perennial vegetation, which can lead to exposed soil and erosion. RAMPS is working to mitigate degradation by increasing productivity and ecosystem function of rangelands. (Credit: Molly McCormick, USGS. Public domain.)
Launched in June 2016, RAMPS was developed to assist U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) and other land management agencies develop successful restoration strategies for the water-limited ecosystems of the Southwest. RAMPS is funded by DOI and composed of scientists and managers from multiple USGS Science Centers, DOI management agencies, and universities.
Why is RAMPS Needed?
The Restoration Assessment and Monitoring Program for the Southwest (RAMPS) seeks to assist U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) and other land management agencies in developing successful treatment activities, such as restoration, mitigation, rehabilitation, and land enhancement. Invasion by non-native species, wildfire, drought, and other disturbances are growing rapidly in extent and frequency, creating novel ecosystem states and transitions that create challenging conditions for land managers. Managers can greatly benefit from collaborative, innovative, and dynamic approaches to transmit and receive information on the most effective and resource-efficient approaches to enhance land condition and wildlife habitat. In order to meet this management need, RAMPS has created a hub for information, science, and tools needed to successfully restore degraded areas.
What are the RAMPS activities?
Data synthesis: There is a lack of land treatment, restoration, mitigation, and enhancement data and results that provide managers and practitioners with information about successes and failures that could enhance the effectiveness of subsequent efforts. Learning from successful approaches and replicating those approaches will streamline the decision-making process and enhance outcomes.
Cost-benefit analysis: Cost effectiveness in management and intervention efforts is of primary concern to management agencies and organizations that have limited resources to conduct treatments. Evaluation of projects needs to consider both costs and meeting desired outcomes.
Plant materials guidance: Deciding on appropriate plant materials (seeds, container plants, or cuttings) can be difficult given the potential limited supply of materials and scientific knowledge of appropriate seed transfer zones for species. Access to seed selection tools, plant materials producers, and the latest research on plant materials can improve land enhancement outcomes.
Increasing Access to Monitoring and Information Sharing: Restoration and rehabilitation treatments are frequently conducted to conform to environmental laws and regulations, but are often lacking an effective monitoring framework to determine if treatments have been successful in recovering desirable plant, soil, and ecosystem properties. Deployment of rapid assessment monitoring protocols will increase accountability, create data that can be shared and analyzed on a landscape scale, improve planning and implementation, provide guidance to support effective land treatments, and save money over time by avoiding ineffective treatment practices. Contact RAMPS Coordinator, Molly McCormick to join the RAMPS consortium.
RestoreNet field trial network: Systematic experimental sites that will synthesize existing knowledge on land treatments and test new methods can improve restoration outcomes.
Community of practice: Strengthening a community of practice or knowledge sharing amongst stakeholders who provide land enhancement services will inform the work of RAMPS from the ground-up. This will increase social capital and adaptive capacity within the community.
RAMPS scientist training a local seed collection crew on how to collect tissue samples for DNA analysis. (Credit: Molly McCormick, USGS. Public domain.)
RAMPS scientist meeting with two land managers in arid shrubland. (Credit: Mike Duniway, USGS, Southwest Biological Science Center. Public domain.)
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Date published: August 5, 2017Status: ActiveRestoreNet: Distributed Field Trial Network for Dryland Restoration
Recovery from disturbance represents a substantial challenge to agencies that manage large tracts of land in the Southwest. Despite the demand for restoration and rehabilitation, little information is available to help managers effectively reestablish native perennial vegetation and stabilize soils, especially given changing climate and disturbance regimes.
Forestry and agriculture have...
Contacts: Seth Munson, Brad Butterfield, Elise Gornish -
Date published: April 24, 2017Colorado Plateau Futures: Understanding Agents of Change on the Colorado Plateau to Facilitate Collaborative Adaptation
The objective of this interdisciplinary research effort is to 1) characterize agents of change important to land management decision makers on the Colorado Plateau; 2) identify and analyze relationships between agents of change and key landscape attributes and processes; 3) collectively assess the influence of agents of change and attributes and processes on the services provided by the...
Attribution: Southwest Biological Science Center -
Date published: February 28, 2017Status: ActiveSouthwest Energy Development and Drought (SWEDD)
Deserts of the southwestern US are replete with oil and gas deposits as well as sites for solar, wind, and geothermal energy production. In the past, many of these resources have been too expensive to develop, but increased demand and new technologies have led to an increase in exploration and development. However, desert ecosystems generally have low resilience to disturbance. More frequent,...
Attribution: Southwest Biological Science Center -
Date published: December 16, 2016Restoration and Ecosystem Recovery Dynamics in Arid and Semiarid Landscapes
Dryland regions have been degraded by invasive species, wildfire, overgrazing, agricultural conversion, energy development, recreational activity, and urban growth. These disturbances and others are accelerated by one of the fastest growing human populations in the country and a pressing background of decreasing water availability due to drought and elevated temperatures that are projected to...
Contacts: Seth MunsonAttribution: Southwest Biological Science Center -
Date published: December 16, 2016Colorado Plateau Native Plant Program Field Trial Study
In the southwest US, monsoon precipitation increases sharply along a northwest to southeast gradient. Pleuraphis jamesii or galleta grass, is an important C4 grass species that spans across this large range in precipitation pattern. In this study we are assessing the ability of galleta grass to adapt to changes in the seasonality of rainfall (termed “plasticity”). In the fall of 2014, we...
Contacts: Mike Duniway, Ph.D., Dave HooverAttribution: Southwest Biological Science Center -
Date published: December 15, 2016Status: ActiveDryland Forest Sustainability
Forests in the semiarid southwestern U.S. are expected to be highly vulnerable to increasing aridity anticipated with climate change. In particular, low elevation forests and the processes of tree regeneration and mortality are likely to be highly susceptible to climate change. This work seeks to characterize how, where and when forest ecosystems will change and identify management...
Contacts: John BradfordAttribution: Southwest Biological Science Center -
Date published: December 15, 2016Ecohydrology and Climate Change in Drylands
Drylands cover 40% of the global terrestrial surface and provide important ecosystem services. However, climate forecasts in most dryland regions, especially the southwest U.S., call for increasing aridity. Specifically, changing climate will alter soil water availability, which exerts dominant control over ecosystem structure and function in water-limited, dryland ecosystems. This research...
Contacts: John BradfordAttribution: Southwest Biological Science Center -
Date published: December 15, 2016Status: ActiveNew Approaches for Restoring Colorado Plateau Grasslands
Historic over-grazing of arid grasslands in the Intermountain West has led to widespread soil erosion, loss of plant diversity, and invasion by exotic species. Degraded grassland conditions can be very persistent, even after livestock use has ceased. For example, in national parks on the Colorado Plateau, livestock have been excluded for decades, but soil and native plants have not recovered...
Contacts: Mike Duniway, Ph.D., Rebecca Mann, Terry Fisk, Liz BallengerAttribution: Southwest Biological Science Center -
Date published: December 14, 2016Plant Responses to Drought and Climate Change in the Southwestern United States
Land managers face tremendous challenges in the future as drought and climate change alter the abundance, distribution, and interactions of plant species. These challenges will be especially daunting in the southwestern US, which is already experiencing elevated temperatures and prolonged droughts, resulting in reduced soil moisture in an already water-limited environment. These changes will...
Contacts: Seth MunsonAttribution: Southwest Biological Science Center -
Date published: December 14, 2016Aeolian Dust in Dryland Landscapes of the Western United States
Dust emission caused by wind erosion has received considerable attention because of its far-reaching effects on ecosystems, including the loss of nutrients and water-holding capacity from source areas, changes to climate and global energy balance in areas where dust is entrained in the atmosphere, fertilization of terrestrial and marine ecosystems, in addition to decreases in snow albedo,...
Contacts: Seth MunsonAttribution: Southwest Biological Science Center
Long-term trends in restoration and associated land treatments in the southwestern United States
Restoration treatments, such as revegetation with seeding or invasive species removal, have been applied on U.S. public lands for decades. Temporal trends in these management actions have not been extensively summarized previously, particularly in the southwestern United States where invasive plant species, drought, and fire have altered dryland...
Copeland, Stella M.; Munson, Seth M.; Pilliod, David S.; Welty, Justin L.; Bradford, John B.; Butterfield, Bradley J. Science framework for conservation and restoration of the sagebrush biome: Linking the Department of the Interior’s Integrated Rangeland Fire Management Strategy to long-term strategic conservation actions, Part 1. Science basis and applications
The Science Framework is intended to link the Department of the Interior’s Integrated Rangeland Fire Management Strategy with long-term strategic conservation actions in the sagebrush biome. The Science Framework provides a multiscale approach for prioritizing areas for management and determining effective management strategies within the...
Chambers, Jeanne C.; Beck, Jeffrey L.; Bradford, John B.; Bybee, Jared; Campbell, Steve; Carlson, John; Christiansen, Thomas J; Clause, Karen J.; Collins, Gail; Crist, Michele R.; Dinkins, Jonathan B.; Doherty, Kevin E.; Edwards, Fred; Espinosa, Shawn; Griffin, Kathleen A.; Griffin, Paul; Haas, Jessica R.; Hanser, Steven E.; Havlina, Douglas W.; Henke, Kenneth F.; Hennig, Jacob D.; Joyce, Linda A; Kilkenny, Francis F.; Kulpa, Sarah M; Kurth, Laurie L; Maestas, Jeremy D; Manning, Mary E.; Mayer, Kenneth E. ; Mealor, Brian A.; McCarthy, Clinton; Pellant, Mike; Perea, Marco A.; Prentice, Karen L.; Pyke, David A.; Wiechman , Lief A. ; Wuenschel, Amarina Aridity increases below-ground niche breadth in grass communities
Aridity is an important environmental filter in the assembly of plant communities worldwide. The extent to which root traits mediate responses to aridity, and how they are coordinated with leaf traits, remains unclear. Here, we measured variation in root tissue density (RTD), specific root length (SRL), specific leaf area (SLA), and seed size...
Butterfield, Bradley J.; Bradford, John B.; Munson, Seth M.; Gremer, Jennifer R. Prestoration: Using species in restoration that will persist now and into the future
Climate change presents new challenges for selecting species for restoration. If migration fails to keep pace with climate change, as models predict, the most suitable sources for restoration may not occur locally at all. To address this issue we propose a strategy of “prestoration”: utilizing species in restoration for which a site...
Butterfield, B.J.; Copeland, Stella M.; Munson, Seth M.; Roybal, C.M.; Wood, Troy E. Climate drives shifts in grass reproductive phenology across the western USA
The capacity of grass species to alter their reproductive timing across space and through time can indicate their ability to cope with environmental variability and help predict their future performance under climate change.We determined the long-term (1895–2013) relationship between flowering times of grass species and climate in space and time...
Munson, Seth M.; Long, A. Lexine Rangeland monitoring reveals long-term plant responses to precipitation and grazing at the landscape scale
Managers of rangeland ecosystems require methods to track the condition of natural resources over large areas and long periods of time as they confront climate change and land use intensification. We demonstrate how rangeland monitoring results can be synthesized using ecological site concepts to understand how climate, site factors, and...
Munson, Seth M.; Duniway, Michael C.; Johanson, Jamin K. Desert grassland responses to climate and soil moisture suggest divergent vulnerabilities across the southwestern US
Climate change predictions include warming and drying trends, which are expected to be particularly pronounced in the southwestern United States. In this region, grassland dynamics are tightly linked to available moisture, yet it has proven difficult to resolve what aspects of climate drive vegetation change. In part, this is because it is unclear...
Gremer, Jennifer; Bradford, John B.; Munson, Seth M.; Duniway, Michael C. Repeated landscape-scale treatments following fire suppress a non-native annual grass and promote recovery of native perennial vegetation
Invasive non-native species pose a large threat to restoration efforts following large-scale disturbances. Bromus tectorum (cheatgrass) is a non-native annual grass in the western U.S. that both spreads quickly following fire and accelerates the fire cycle. Herbicide and seeding applications are common restoration practices to break the...
Munson, Seth M.; Long, A. Lexine; Decker, Cheryl E.; Johnson, Katie A.; Walsh, Kathleen; Miller, Mark E. Simulated big sagebrush regeneration supports predicted changes at the trailing and leading edges of distribution shifts
Many semi-arid plant communities in western North America are dominated by big sagebrush. These ecosystems are being reduced in extent and quality due to economic development, invasive species, and climate change. These pervasive modifications have generated concern about the long-term viability of sagebrush habitat and sagebrush-obligate wildlife...
Schlaepfer, Daniel R.; Taylor, Kyle A.; Pennington, Victoria E.; Nelson, Kellen N.; Martin, Trace E.; Rottler, Caitlin M.; Lauenroth, William K.; Bradford, John B.-
Date published: December 14, 2016APPLICATION - RAMPS Climate Partitioning Tool
The purpose of this application is to aid sampling efforts along climate gradients for a geographic region of interest. Examples of potential uses of this tool include: sampling plant materials for common garden studies, establishing common garden arrays, establishing vegetation transects, or banking seed for native plant conservation. Funding support from BLM Colorado Plateau Native Plant...
Attribution: Ecosystems, Southwest Biological Science Center -
Date published: December 14, 2016APPLICATION - RAMPS Seed Selection Tool
The purpose of this application is to aid seed selection efforts of restoration and revegetation practitioners by matching the climate of georeferenced seed sources to potential target sites. Funding support from BLM Colorado Plateau Native Plant Program.
Attribution: Southwest Biological Science Center
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Why doesn't a drought end when it rains?
Rainfall in any form will provide some drought relief. A good analogy might be how medicine and illness relate to each other. A single dose of medicine can alleviate symptoms of illness, but it usually takes a sustained program of medication to cure an illness. Likewise, a single rainstorm will not break the drought, but it might provide temporary... -
What causes drought?
A drought is a period of drier-than-normal conditions that results in water-related problems. The amount of precipitation at a particular location varies from year to year, but over a period of years, the average amount is fairly constant. In the deserts of the Southwest, the average precipitation is less than 3 inches per year. In contrast, the...