Publications

Ongoing sea-level rise has brought renewed focus on terrestrial sediment supply to the coast because of its strong influence on whether and how long beaches, marshes and other coastal landforms may persist into the future. Here, we summarise findings of sediment discharge from several coastal rivers, revealing that infrequent, large-magnitude events have disproportionate influence on the

Improving post-wildfire restoration of foundational plant species is crucial for conserving imperiled ecosystems. We sought to better understand the initial establishment of sagebrush (Artemisia sp.), a foundational shrubland species over a vast area of western North America, in the first 1–2 years post-wildfire, a critical time period for population recovery. Field data from 460...

Sagebrush ecosystems of western North America are threatened by invasive annual grasses and wildfires that can remove fire-intolerant shrubs for decades. Fuel reduction treatments are used ostensibly to aid in fire suppression, conserve wildlife habitat, and restore historical fire regimes, but long-term ecological impacts of these treatments are not clear. In 2006, we initiated fuel...

Megafires are creating severe conservation problems worldwide for wildlife that have obligate dependencies on plant species that are foundational but fire-intolerant. Wildfire-induced loss of native perennials and increases in exotic annual grasses threaten greater sage-grouse (GRSG, Centrocercus urophasianus) in its sagebrush steppe habitat in western North America. Post-fire...

Accurate predictions of ecological restoration outcomes are needed across the increasingly large landscapes requiring treatment following disturbances. However, observational studies often fail to account for nonrandom treatment application, which can result in invalid inference. Examining a spatiotemporally extensive management treatment-- post-fire seeding of declining sagebrush shrubs...

Interannual variation, especially weather, is an often-cited reason for restoration “failures”; yet its importance is difficult to experimentally isolate across broad spatiotemporal extents, due to correlations between weather and site characteristics. We examined post-fire treatments within sagebrush-steppe ecosystems to ask: (1) Is weather following seeding efforts a primary reason why

Increased fire size and frequency coupled with annual grass invasion pose major challenges to sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) ecosystem conservation, which is currently focused on protecting sagebrush community composition and structure. A common strategy for mitigating potential fire is to use fuel treatments that alter the structure and amount of burnable material, thus reducing fire...

Questions: Selective herbicide application is a common restoration strategy to control exotic invaders that interfere with native plant recovery after wildfire. Whether spraying with preemergent or bioherbicides releases native plants from competition with exotics (“spray-and-release” strategy) and can make communities resistant to re-invasion by exotic annual grasses (e.g., cheatgrass...

Habitat loss is the most prevalent threat to biodiversity in North America. One of the most threatened landscapes in the United States is the sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) ecosystem, much of which has been fragmented or converted to non-native grasslands via the cheatgrass-fire cycle. Like many sagebrush obligates, greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) depend upon sagebrush for...

Wildfire and post-fire rainfall have resounding effects on hillslope processes and sediment yields of mountainous landscapes. Yet, it remains unclear how fire–flood sequences influence downstream coastal littoral systems. It is timely to examine terrestrial–coastal connections because climate change is increasing the frequency, size, and intensity of wildfires, altering precipitation...

• Use of adaptive management supported by robust monitoring is vital to solving severe rangeland problems, such as the exotic annual grass invasion and fire cycle in sagebrush-steppe rangelands. • Uncertainty in post-fire plant-community composition and plant response to treatments poses a challenge to land management and research but can be addressed with a high density of observations...

Burn severity influences on post-fire recovery of soil-hydraulic properties controlling runoff generation are poorly understood despite the importance for parameterizing infiltration models. We measured soil-hydraulic properties of field-saturated hydraulic conductivity (Kfs), sorptivity (S), and wetting front potential (ψf) for four years after the 2013 Black Forest Fire, Colorado, USA...