The intent of this study is to determine our ability to predict successful treatment with the application of Tebuthiuron to reduce Wyoming big sagebrush and increase herbaceous perennial vegetation. The initial stage of this study was to determine if the information available through the Arizona Strip BLM�s key area trend monitoring program could be utilized to predict the potential success of treating sagebrush dominated plant communities. From 1994 to 2010 approximately 108,000 acres were treated with Tebuthiuron on the Arizona Strip. BLM records were searched to identify potential sites for analysis. 77 sites were treated with Tebuthiuron and a multi-agency team visited these sites. At each location the team verified that a treatment had occurred, obtained soil information, verified the ecological site, took photographs, produced a species list in order of apparent dominance, and made an assessment of the success of the treatment. Information from the monitoring data included frequency of perennial plants and ground cover information.� Components of this monitoring along with additional information collected by the team were then statistically analyzed for their reliability of predicting a threshold of success. This analysis did not provide a significant conclusion. The next stage of this project will be to analyze post treatment precipitation as a predictor of successful treatment. The Arizona Strip has many years of rainfall data that is collected quarterly. With the addition of precipitation data we hope to determine if post-treatment precipitation drives the success of Tebuthiuron treatments.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.