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Wednesday, June 8, 2022
OSU finds ways to slow wildfires
in critical sagebrush rangelands
By ALEX BAUMHARDT
Oregon Capital Chronicle
Nearly 45% of historic
sagebrush ecosystems in
the Great Basin — 200,000
square miles of Califor-
nia, Idaho, Nevada, Ore-
gon, Utah and Wyoming
— have been lost to inva-
sive plants, grasses and
wildfires, according to the
federal Bureau of Land
Management.
To slow the frequency
and severity of such fires,
scientists at Oregon State
University undertook a
10-year study of the long-
term effects of popular fire
prevention and mitigation
methods to see which ones
were successful over many
years, and which only had
short-term impacts.
In a new report pub-
lished in the scientific jour-
nal Ecosphere, those scien-
tists concluded that thinning
vegetation across the sage-
brush landscape was the
most effective, long-term
method for mitigating wild-
fire spread and severity.
Other methods, such as pre-
scribed burns and the use of
herbicides to kill nonnative
grasses and invasive tree
and shrub species were only
effective in the short term.
The OSU scientists
teamed up with specialists
from Great Basin states,
including Eva Strand, a pro-
fessor of rangeland ecology
and management at the Uni-
versity of Idaho. She said
studying this over a decade
gave scientists a broader
perspective.
“A treatment might be
Mitch Maxson/The Nature Conservancy
To slow the frequency and severity of such fires, scientists
at Oregon State University undertook a 10-year study of the
long-term effects of popular fire prevention and mitigation
methods to see which ones were successful over many years.
followed for a couple years,
but there’s no looking at the
long-term response,” she
said. “With this, we could
see for how long these meth-
ods are effective in mitigat-
ing wildfire.”
The scientists didn’t
ignite fires but used com-
puter models to study how
each treatment — thinning,
herbicides or prescribed
burns — could impact the
speed of a fire’s spread and
the height of the flames.
In their study, the scien-
tists found that herbicides
left behind dead vegetation
that could create hotter fires
with higher flames. They
found prescribed burns were
effective short term, but
long term, invasive grasses
quickly returned and rees-
tablished themselves, creat-
ing a greater fire risk.
Strand said their findings
will also impact firefighter
safety in a wildfire.
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“We were able to model
how they actually impact
fire behavior,” she said. “We
can tell which methods cre-
ate shorter flame lengths, so
firefighters can approach it
in a different way.”
Oversight by BLM
The bulk of sagebrush
ecosystems in the Great
Basin are overseen by the
BLM, which is currently
involved in a project to cre-
ate fuel breaks along 435
miles of roads throughout
sagebrush habitat along the
Oregon-Idaho-Nevada bor-
der in the Great Basin. These
are areas where the BLM is
reducing vegetation like
grasses and trees in order to
reduce the probability of a
fire spreading and growing
in height.
The scientists hope their
research can inform the
methods the agency adopts
to create those fuel breaks.
“We need to be imple-
menting strategies that pre-
serve our good-condition
sagebrush steppe areas and
get ahead of this invasive
grass and fire feedback cycle
that we’re in,” said Lisa
Ellsworth, lead author of the
study and a range ecologist
at OSU, in a statement.
Ellsworth said that sage-
brush ecosystems are among
the most fragile ecosys-
tems on the North American
continent.