Session: Restoration Successes
Tuesday 2:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. Ballroom 2
Paul Krabacher, Moderator
2:00 p.m.
Successful Restoration of Native Plant Communities in the Great Basin Depends on....?
Mike Pellant
Presentation (PDF)
The Great Basin is North America’s largest desert, encompassing nearly 55 million ha of land between the Rocky and Sierra Nevada Mountains in western North America. The US Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management is responsible for managing 30 million ha of rangelands for multiple uses in this arid and challenging environment. Invasive species, wildfires, climate change, and human activities all test managers’ efforts to maintain and restore native plant communities. Successful native plant restoration depends on many inter-related factors, some of which are outside the influence of resource managers. The unpredictable climate punctuated by periodic drought and low precipitation (under 12 inches annual precipitation over half of the Great Basin) stresses native plant seedings. Climate change will further challenge our ability to restore and maintain native communities. The threat of a wildfire is always present as are a host of native and exotic invasive species. Cheatgrass is common throughout the Great Basin and lack of adequate control prior to seeding often results in failures. Availability of native plant materials, knowledge of seedbed ecology, and equipment to distribute seed or seedlings is often lacking. There is not a consistent demand for native seed from year to year since demand is driven primarily by numbers of wildfires. A long-term restoration account would solve this problem and the Great Basin Native Plant Selection and Increase Project has nearly 20 cooperators working on providing native plant materials and technology to successfully reestablish native plant communities. Long-term management and monitoring is critical to maintaining the longevity and diversity of restored native plant communities. A high priority must be given to protecting our investments in native plant restoration. New strategies such as assisted succession and strategic use of introduced species to reduce wildfires (e.g., greenstrips) should not be ignored in our efforts to maintain and restore native plant communities in the Great Basin.
Mike is the coordinator for BLM’s Great Basin Restoration Initiative (GBRI) and the point of contact for the Department of Interior’s Great Basin Landscape Conservation Cooperative. As coordinator for GBRI, Mike provides program and technical assistance to BLM Field Offices on restoration projects, participates in regional scientific studies, and promotes proactive rangeland restoration on 78 million acres of public land. Mike started his career with BLM in Utah in 1976 as a rangeland inventory specialist and moved to Boise in 1981 as a supervisory range conservationist in the Boise District. Before assuming his current position, he was a rangeland ecologist in the BLM’s Idaho State Office where he served as the Fire Rehabilitation program lead and the greenstripping program (strategic plantings of fire resistant vegetation) project manager. He was born and raised in Kansas where he received a B.S. in Biology and a M.S. in Range Science from Fort Hays State University.
2:30 p.m.
Strategic Rehabilitation and Management in Smaller Natural Areas
Johnny Randall
Presentation (PDF)
Within the wildland-urban interface many remnant ecosystems occur with high biodiversity importance. The conservation, rehabilitation, and management of these sites is challenging because of habitat fragmentation, exotic plant invasions, and prescribed fire limitations. Despite these challenges we have greatly improved the habitat for numerous plant and animal species through tactical nature preserve design and small-scale management. We hope that our work can help to demonstrate that even remnant natural areas can be brought back from the brink and contribute to the overall conservation of biodiversity.
Johnny Randall has both a M.S. and Ph.D. in Botany and served as university faculty for ten years before joining the North Carolina Botanical Garden and adjunct faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1998 as Associate Director for Conservation. At NCBG Johnny oversees the conservation and management of natural areas, administers rare plant programs, and coordinates the NCBG regional seed bank. Johnny came to the North Carolina Botanical Garden as an Associate Director and adjunct faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1998, where he administers approximately 900 acres of natural area - all of which require some management from invasive plant species removal to prescribed fire. The active rehabilitation projects focus on the conversion of old agricultural fields to native plant meadows and the creation of open woodlands that can support shade intolerant herbaceous plants.
3:00 p.m.
Seeds, Plugs and Bulbs: Native Plant Material Strategies to Achieve Prairie Restoration Success
Trevor Taylor
Presentation (PDF)
A goal of many wetland restoration projects is to achieve diverse native plant communities which are sustainable in the long-term; in practice this is rarely achieved. Using ecological principles such as assembly rules and succession, the West Eugene Wetlands Program has implemented an innovative approach to wet prairie restoration. A central focus of the approach includes a strategic seeding regime to produce the desired result of high native species diversity and abundance, low non-native cover, and resistance to invasion by non-native species. This presentation will describe tenets of this approach emphasizing strategies to improve colonization and species performance. A key to the success of these strategies has been adequate access to plant materials. As such, the efforts of the Rivers to Ridges Partnership to develop a large regional plant materials program will also be discussed.
Trevor Taylor works for the City of Eugene, Parks and Open Space Division. He is the Natural Areas Restoration Supervisor and has been implementing habitat restoration projects for 20 years. He has masters degrees in both Biology and Environmental Studies from the University of Oregon and a B.S. in Conservation of Resource Studies from U.C. Berkeley.
4:00 p.m.
Use of native species in SMCRA-regulated reclamation in the Western U.S.: Their importance in modulating competition levels
David L. Buckner
Presentation (PDF)
Use of native plant species has been emphasized in the regulations promulgated pursuant to the Surface Mine Control Reclamation Act of 1977 (SMCRA). The wording of most state regulation makes clear the presumptive use of native species, though the use of non-native can be approved with adequate justification. Experience in reclamation under SMCRA in the early years quickly showed that non-native domesticated forage species, especially grasses would readily satisfy cover and forage production requirements but made achievement of species diversity and woody plant density requirements extremely unlikely. This was a reflection of the high levels of competition posed by these agriculturally-selected plants. As a result, the use of less competitive plants was desirable and native species in general fall into that category. Many native grass species are substantially slower to establish and achieve competitive maturity. In a newly seeded area, this slow development of competitive effect allows other less competitive lifeforms such as perennial forbs, subshrubs and shrubs the opportunity to establish. Even native species can out-compete desirable shrub and forb species and it has been necessary to reduce seeding rates of native grasses in many cases to provide the competitive “room” for establishment of forbs and shrubs. Of course it is always necessary to have enough initial perennial cover to achieve erosional stability, making achievement of this balance an art and not an easily repeated recipe. Through the course of the past 30+ years, the availability of native plant seed has increased substantially. This is in no small part the result of the sizeable market that SMCRA- related reclamation seeding has generated.
Dave Buckner, the President and Senior Plant Ecologist at ESCO Associates, Inc. is a life-long resident of Boulder, Colorado, earning degrees (1970 B.A., 1973 M.A. and 1977 Ph.D.) in Biology from the University of Colorado. Dave is active in the restoration / revegetation of disturbances in native plant communities of the Intermountain West and Great Plains. He has explored the nature of vegetation occupying ancient soils on alluvial deposits along the Colorado Front Range. Dave is active in the development and execution of methods for repeatable plant data collection for long-term monitoring. Currently Dave is assisting the with exploration of sustaining plant communities beneath photo-voltaic solar arrays.
4:30 p.m.
Discussion: What is Successful Restoration?
Paul Krabacher
