Invasive annual grasses are a primary, severe, and challenging threat to habitat conservation and restoration for sage-dependent wildlife across federal, state and private lands. Successful management solutions for sagebrush rangelands are likely to be multiphasic, involving some sequence of interventions such as herbicides, seeding of competitive natives that also create habitat, and temporarily altering land use, in an adaptive-management approach. The proposed work tests different herbicides and options for applying them with different seeding and land uses, across a gradient of climate and soils in Interior Regions 5 and 7.
This research will examine the efficacy of management options for controlling cheatgrass in areas where cheatgrass hand not yet established as a monoculture. Supports a key priority for all state and federal land management agencies within the range of sagebrush and may have implications for other invasive brome species in other ecosystems
PI/Funding recipients organization: Snake River Field Station