Restoration success has often been described as overcoming the resilience of an undesirable ecological state and promoting a more desirable one that provides greater ecosystem services to society. Yet, operationalizing resilience in this way does not explicitly account for scale and the logistical and economical constraints that preclude restoration success at broader scales. For example, mechanical removal of�Juniperus�spp. that have invaded into Great Plains grasslands is the preferred restoration option but has been too costly to meet the scale of invasion. Restoration success is limited to small acreages, allowing�Juniperus�trees to invade into surrounding landscapes. Shifts from grassland to juniper dominance is now a pervasive issue across multiple Great Plains states, and questions on how to scale up restoration success has emerged as a focal issue. In this paper, I introduce findings from the Loess Canyon Experimental Landscape (LCEL), an innovative approach to rangeland restoration that centers on the use of extreme fire to restore grassland dominance in an ecoregion that has been converted to�Juniperus�woodland. The LCEL is a partnership between the Applied Complex Adaptive Systems Lab at the University of Nebraska and the Loess Canyon Rangeland Alliance, a landowner prescribed burn cooperative that is using extreme fires to restore grassland dominance in woody invaded rangelands across 180,000 contiguous acres. This experimental landscape is now the largest scale restoration of high intensity fires as a fundamental component of rangeland management in the entire Great Plains biome, and we present early evidence indicating that multiple ecosystem services are being enhanced as a result of this restoration effort.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.