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Project ID:

25-2-03-13

Year:

2025

Date Started:

09/01/2025

Date Completed:

Title:

How do invasive plants affect the spatial and temporal patterns of fuel structure and moisture, and influence fire regimes?

Project Proposal Abstract:

Proposal Purpose and Objectives. Invasive plants change the structure and moisture content of the understory fuel bed (i.e. flammability), and this is not adequately accounted for in wildland fire fuel models used by fire managers. Some invasive plants make previously nonflammable areas flammable, while others lower flammability, potentially inhibiting prescribed fire efforts. Our objective is to directly measure the fuel bed characteristics used in wildland fire fuel models from a list of species previously identified as species of concern by stakeholders. We will use these data to determine which currently used fuel model best characterizes each species, and create new models when current models are inadequate. These models will allow us to characterize how invasions would change the existing fuelscape, and use fire simulation modeling to characterize how they would change fire regimes.

Activities to be Performed. The three primary activities of the proposed work are: 1) Directly measure fuel structural characteristics that are used in wildland fire fuel models for invasive species of concern identified by land managers across seven states in the north central US and western great plains; 2) Measure a multi-year time series of fuel moisture for a representative subset of those species to characterize the seasonality (i.e. phenology) in fuel moisture content so that managers can more accurately forecast seasonal fire risk in invaded landscapes; 3) Simulate fire activity in different seasons to characterize how and when these species change fire regimes if they invade the major vegetation types in the eastern slope of the Colorado Front Range and the grasslands of Northeast Colorado.

Expected Deliverables. The proposed work will provide a new toolbox of invasive plant fuel models that land managers and researchers will be able to plug into existing wildland fire fuel models to more accurately assess fire risk and plan for future fires. We will incorporate these into existing decision support tools, improving the ability of land managers to see where on the landscape invasive species will change the fuelscape, which will help them target areas for exotic plant control treatments. Finally the broader fire science and ecology fields will benefit from a comprehensive analysis of how the wide range of invasive plants that are of the highest concern may affect fire regimes in the future.

Benefits. This work will improve our ability to forecast fire risk through more accurately estimating the effects that invasive plants have on fuel bed properties. This will improve fire safety for those living in the wildland urban interface, potentially saving lives, communities, and billions of dollars in infrastructure. This work will benefit the government by assisting fire managers in improving their ability to model fire risk, and more efficiently prioritize areas for fuels management. This work will advance our scientific knowledge of herbaceous fuels by providing fundamental knowledge of fuel structure and phenology for many species of concern, which is a major knowledge gap. We will then use this knowledge to increase our understanding of how invasive plants change fire regimes.

Principal Investigator:

Dave M Barnard

Agency/Organization:

ARS-Agricultural Research Service

Branch or Dept:

Exotic & Invasive Weeds Research Unit-Albany

Other Project Collaborators

Type	Name	Agency/Organization	Branch or Dept
Agreements Contact	Sydney J Dean	ARS-Agricultural Research Service
Budget Contact	Sydney J Dean	ARS-Agricultural Research Service
Co-Principal Investigator	Adam L. Mahood	ARS-Agricultural Research Service	Land Management and Water Conservation Research
Co-Principal Investigator	Alison Post	University of Colorado-Boulder	Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES)
Co-Principal Investigator	Jonathan J. Henn	University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign	Department of Natural Resources & Environmental Sciences
Co-Principal Investigator	R Chelsea Nagy	University of Colorado-Boulder	Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES)