What is buffelgrass?
Buffelgrass is a perennial grass from Africa that is invasive to the Sonoran Desert of the Southwest United States, where it threatens desert ecosystems by out-competing native plants and altering fire regimes. It has the potential to transform the Sonoran Desert ecosystem from a diverse assemblage of plants to a grassland monoculture.
Buffelgrass was brought to Arizona in the 1930s for erosion control and began expanding rapidly in the 1980s. Left unchecked, buffelgrass will dominate the desert landscape and could cause regular, fast-moving wildfires.
USGS research shows that early treatment of areas invaded by buffelgrass can dramatically reduce the presence of this species.
Related Content
Buffelgrass-Integrated modeling of an invasive plant
Buffelgrass (Pennisetum ciliare) poses a problem in the deserts of the United States, growing in dense stands and introducing a wildfire risk in an ecosystem not adapted to fire. The Invasive Species Science Branch of the Fort Collins Science Center has worked with many partners to develop a decision support model and a data management system to...
Holcombe, Tracy R.
PubTalk 8/2010 — Invasives and Wildfires in the West
New Crossroads in Science, Policy, and Management
by Julio Betancourt, Sr. Scientist and Desert Ecologist
- Exponential spread of non-native grasses is a pressing environmental issue in American Deserts
- Invasive grasses increased fuel continuity and large wildfires in desert scrub that previously experienced little or no
Dense stand of Buffelgrass, Saguaro National Park, AZ
Dense stand of the invasive grass buffelgrass choking out native vegetation in Saguaro National Park, Arizona.
Sonoran Desert Landscape Buffelgrass
Figure 1. Examples of (left) a Sonoran Desert landscape showing the characteristic arrangement of patches of native vegetation separated by bare ground; and (right) a Sonoran Desert landscape that has been invaded by buffelgrass, which fills in the open spaces to form a relatively continuous mat of highly flammable plant
...
Buffelgrass Invasion of Native Arizona Vegetation
Figure 10. Correlation coefficients for various amounts of buffelgrass in the five dominant vegetation types at SNP that have buffelgrass invasion. In these graphs, the horizontal axis values represent the number of prior time periods over which precipitation is summed, with 0 = current precipitation, 1= precipitation from the previous time period, 2 =
...
Citizen Science Buffelgrass Observation
Figure 2.Map showing the locations of the citizen science buffelgrass observation sites in Tucson, Arizona, and the outlined polygons of buffelgrass patches in Saguaro National Park East and West. Buffelgrass density is coded as High (H); Medium (M); Low (L) and Trace (T).
