Applying prescribed extreme fire within a resilience framework to help stakeholders adapt to changing rangeland environments

Background/Question/Methods

A growing demand of society is to efficiently allocate and sustain natural resources in the face of environmental change.  This challenges scientists to develop theoretical and applied frameworks that can be directly integrated with the management and restoration goals of land managers over past, present, and future timelines.  Importantly, such a framework needs to help prepare stakeholders to adapt to future potential changes in climate dynamics, disturbance regimes, and ecosystem transformations.  For these reasons, we modeled the resilience and transformation of grassland and juniper woodland states to changes in fire and precipitation regimes at the Texas A&M Agrilife Research Center located near Sonora, TX.  We then determined the extent resource managers could apply this information to manage or restore rangeland ecosystems, now and in the future, given the dominant social policies governing fire management in this region.

Results/Conclusions

We show changes in fire and precipitation regimes have the potential to alter rangeland management strategies in this region.  Under the current precipitation regime, changes in the fire regime can lead to perpetual cycles of grassland and juniper woodland.  The removal of fire in grassland leads to the emergence of a juniper woodland state that is highly resilient to fire.  However, grassland can be restored from juniper woodland with fire, but only under extreme fire conditions that are typical of wildfires.  While fire is currently the primary driver of ecosystem transformations in this system, changes in the precipitation regime can disrupt the cyclic capacity of this system, eventually leading to a system driven by alternate disturbances.  For stakeholders, such an event may require major philosophical shifts on how best to manage for rangeland resources, and they are likely to face a novel array of social and ecological thresholds that dictate rangeland management techniques.  We show an example of how some stakeholders are developing novel approaches to fire management in this region, and how such an approach has the potential to create a more adaptive resource management strategy in the wake of future environmental change.