Observed declines in native pollinator species worldwide has generated concern and focused research into the disturbances, past and present, which may have contributed to these losses. In grasslands, for example, habitat degradation and fragmentation from historical and current crop production and livestock grazing has left only a few remnants of...
Ventenata dubia L. (ventenata) is an introduced, winter annual grass that has recently been raising concerns across the Pacific Northwest Bunchgrass Prairie and the Palouse Prairie. It is well established now in pasturelands, croplands, and a variety of ecosystems including grasslands, sagebrush steppe, ponderosa pine forests and woodlands. Ventenata is...
Landscape fire succession models (LFSMs) predict spatially–explicit interactions between vegetation
succession and disturbance, but these models have yet to fully integrate ungulate herbivory as a driver of
their processes. We modified a complex LFSM, FireBGCv2, to include a multi-species herbivory module,
GrazeBGC. The system is novel in that it explicitly...
Invasion by non-native plants into natural areas is an important component of global change that threatens biodiversity and ecosystem structure and function. Mountains are currently among the least invaded ecosystems, however, these biodiversity hotspots are increasingly under threat of exotic plant invasion. Evaluation of plant species distribution patterns in mountain...
An experiment was conducted to evaluate the influence of forest fuels reduction on diet quality, botanical composition, relative preference, and foraging efficiency of beef cattle grazing at different stocking rates. A split plot factorial design was used, with whole plots (3 ha) being fuel reduced or no treatment (control), and...
We conducted a study to compare the bite-count technique (BC) of estimating forage intake and synthesized diet quality to direct estimates of diet quantity and quality with the use of the rumen evacuation technique (RE). We used four rumen-fistulated steers to evaluate both techniques. Four enclosures in a mixed-conifer rangeland...
Rangelands are significant providers of ecosystem services in agroecosystems world‐wide. Yet few studies have investigated how different intensities of livestock grazing impact one important provider of these ecosystem services—native bees. We conducted the first large‐scale manipulative study on the effect of a gradient of livestock grazing intensities on native bees...
One second GPS collars were deployed on cattle in three different pastures at three separate times during the year. In each riparian pasture the vegetative communities and stream bank edge were digitally mapped using low elevation aerial photographs and checked in the field for accuracy. A 5 m buffer zone...