Investing in rangeland restoration in the Arid West, USA: countering the effects of an invasive weed on the long-term fire cycle.

In large areas of the arid western United States, much of which are federally managed, fire frequencies and associated management costs are escalating as flammable, invasive cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) increases its stronghold. Cheatgrass invasion and the subsequent increase in fire frequency result in the loss of native vegetation, less predictable forage availability for livestock and wildlife, and increased costs and risk associated with firefighting. Revegetation following fire on land that is partially invaded by cheatgrass can reduce both the dominance of cheatgrass and its associated high fire rate.

Approximating the distribution of recreational visits from on-site survey data.

While convenient and often used, on-site surveys are biased by the fact that users who visit the site more often are proportionately more likely to be sampled. This so-called avidity or size biased sampling results in over-estimating the visitation patterns of the average user. This analysis develops a rule of thumb method that may easily be applied by recreation site managers to visitation data collected on-site in order to infer behavior of the average user of the site.