Weather is a major driver of fire and ecosystem recovery or degradation following fire, in shrub steppe and other semiarid rangelands. In particular, weather is the principle agent driving erosive losses of soil following fire, which can have dramatic effects on ecosystem recovery and poses a number of risks to humans and rehabilitation efforts. Predicting where and when wind erosion is likely would be a key step towards improving post-fire rehabilitation of rangelands. Wind erosion results from the wind generated by weather, but also from weather effects on protective vegetation or litter cover, soil wetting/drying cycles, and physical impaction of soil surface surfaces. Published and preliminary evidence reveal ways that weather-related forces have threshold effects on wind erosion, particularly on erosivity of the landscape (vegetation growth) and particularly erodibility of soil (threshold windspeeds, which are affected by moisture). Prospects exist for combining weather forecasts along with weather and wind erosion probabilities based on historic tendencies of ecological site types to help predict where and when erosion risks are likely.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.