Spot-fire distance increases disproportionately for wildfires compared to prescribed fires as grasslands transition to Juniperus woodlands.

Woody encroachment is one of the greatest threats to grasslands globally, depleting a suite of ecosystem services, including forage production and grassland biodiversity. Recent evidence also suggests that woody encroachment increases wildfire danger, particularly in the Great Plains of North America, where highly volatile Juniperus spp. convert grasslands to an alternative woodland state.

Next-generation technologies unlock new possibilities to track rangeland productivity and quantify multi-scale conservation outcomes.

Historically, relying on plot-level inventories impeded our ability to quantify large-scale change in plant biomass, a key indicator of conservation practice outcomes in rangeland systems. Recent technological advances enable assessment at scales appropriate to inform management by providing spatially comprehensive estimates of productivity that are partitioned by plant functional group across all contiguous US rangelands. We partnered with the Sage Grouse and Lesser Prairie-Chicken Initiatives and the Nebraska Natural Legacy Project to demonstrate the ability of these new datasets to quantify multi-scale changes and heterogeneity in plant biomass following mechanical tree removal, prescribed fire, and prescribed grazing.

Overcoming an "irreversible" threshold: A 15-year fire experiment.

A key pursuit in contemporary ecology is to differentiate regime shifts that are truly irreversible from those that are hysteretic. Many ecological regime shifts have been labeled as irreversible without exploring the full range of variability in stabilizing feedbacks that have the potential to drive an ecological regime shift back towards a desirable ecological regime. Removing fire from grasslands can drive a regime shift to juniper woodlands that cannot be reversed using typical fire frequency and intensity thresholds, and has thus been considered irreversible.

Fire legacies in eastern ponderosa pine forests.

Disturbance legacies structure communities and ecological memory, but due to increasing changes in disturbance regimes, it is becoming more difficult to characterize disturbance legacies or determine how long they persist. We sought to quantify the characteristics and persistence of material legacies (e.g.

Early Warnings for State Transitions.

New concepts have emerged in theoretical ecology with the intent to quantify complexities in ecological change that are unaccounted for in state-and-transition models and to provide applied ecologists with statistical early warning metrics able to predict and prevent state transitions. With its rich history of furthering ecological theory and its robust and broad-scale monitoring frameworks, the rangeland discipline is poised to empirically assess these newly proposed ideas while also serving as early adopters of novel statistical metrics that provide advanced warning of a pending shift to an alternative ecological regime. Were view multivariate early warning and regime shift detection metrics, identify situations where various metrics will be most useful for rangeland science, and then highlight known shortcomings.

Social-ecological landscape patterns predict woody encroachment from native tree plantings in a temperate grassland.

Afforestation is often viewed as the purposeful planting of trees in historically nonforested grasslands, but an unintended consequence is woody encroachment, which should be considered part of the afforestation process. In North America's temperate grassland biome, Eastern redcedar ( L.) is a native species used in tree plantings that aggressively invades in the absence of controlling processes.

The impacts of forest management strategies for woodland caribou vary across biogeographic gradients.

Loss or alteration of forest ecosystems due to anthropogenic activities has prompted the need for mitigation measures aimed at protecting habitat for forest-dependent wildlife. Understanding how wildlife respond to such management efforts is essential for achieving conservation targets. Boreal caribou are a species of conservation concern due to the impacts of human induced habitat alteration; however the effects of habitat management activities are poorly understood.