Significant amounts of arid sagebrush habitat in Nevada and the surrounding Great Basin is being converted by wildfire to plant communities dominated by introduced annual grasses and forbs. This habitat alteration adversely affects hydrology, soils, wildlife habitat, recreation, fire cycles, domestic livestock, and aesthetics. Once converted, this land is extremely difficult and expensive to convert back to a healthier state. In an effort to prevent this transition to introduced annual plants, the BLM, NRCS, and other public and private organizations have mowed thousands of acres of Wyoming Big Sagebrush plant communities across the Great Basin. Some of these mow treatments are conducted as fuel breaks for wildfire control. Others are conducted with the goal of increasing the perennial herbaceous understory in order to enhance resilience, wildlife habitat, watershed values, or aesthetics. Between 2010 and 2014, we have collected point-intercept data at 112 individual locations from 42 separate mowing projects in and immediately adjacent to Nevada in an attempt to determine the vegetation and ground cover effects of mowing, and also whether stated goals are being accomplished.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.