Fort Laramie National Historic Site 2022 ABAM Investigator Annual Report

The Annual Brome Adaptive Management (ABAM) project is a consortium of seven parks in the Northern Great Plains working together to better understand how to control invasive annual grasses (including Bromus species) through an adaptive management approach. This approach is supported by a quantitative model that uses current data from standardized vegetation monitoring plots in all seven parks to annually update the model's parameters and predictions regarding the effects of different management actions on invasive annual grasses and other components of the mixed-grass prairie plant community. This updating is called "learning." Currently, the ABAM model has little information about the effects of the herbicide indaziflam, applied alone or together with the herbicide imazapic, at different times during the growing season, on target invasive annual grasses and other components of the vegetation. The purpose of this study is to increase the amount of information about this herbicide and therefore accelerate the rate of learning accomplished in the adaptive management cycle.