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 them.
Buffelgrass Research
Southern Border Fuels Management Initiative
Documenting, Mapping, and Predicting Invasive Species Using the Fort Collins Science Center's RAM (Resource for Advanced Modeling)
- Overview
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 them.
Buffelgrass ResearchSouthern Border Fuels Management Initiative
The Southern Border Fuels Management Initiative was initiated in 2017 to reduce wildfire risk and improve border security by actively conducting fuels treatments on Department of Interior (DOI) and tribal lands within 100 miles of the US-Mexico border. The initiative supports Executive Order 13855: Promoting Active Management of America’s Forests, Rangelands, and Other Federal Land to Improve...Documenting, Mapping, and Predicting Invasive Species Using the Fort Collins Science Center's RAM (Resource for Advanced Modeling)
The Resource for Advanced Modeling room provides a collaborative working environment for up to 20 scientists, supported with networked, wireless computing capability for running and testing various scientific models (e.g., Maxent, Boosted Regression Trees, Logistic Regression, MARS, Random Forest) at a variety of spatial scales, from county to global levels. Models use various predictor layers... - Data
- Publications