Where Have All the Grasslands Gone?

Fire and Vegetation Change in Northern New Mexico (page 5 of 5)

Author: Craig D. Allen. Adapted from: Allen, C.D. 1998. Where have all the grasslands gone? Quivera Coalition Newsletter, Spring/Summer.

Restoring the Balance

Most forests, woodlands, and grasslands in northern New Mexico evolved with frequent, low-intensity fires. The removal of the natural process of fire by human suppression has disrupted these ecosystems in many ways, including the loss of much grassy vegetation as woody plants have expanded in distribution and increased in density. Fire suppression during this century has promoted conditions that today threaten New Mexico’s forests with increasingly large, intense, and uncontrollable crown fires. The past 20 years have been unusually wet in our region, but true drought conditions (like the 1950s) will certainly recur unless global climate has indeed changed recently. The Dome and Hondo Fires that took place after the dry winter of 1996 are just a small foreshadowing of the potential for enormous and unnaturally intense wildfires to burn through our overcrowded forests and woodlands when multi-year drought returns. Such large crown fires will have many undesirable ecological and social effects, from degradation of habitats for endangered species to downstream flooding of human settlements.

Many local forests, woodlands, and grasslands need to be restored to more open conditions to protect both ecological values and human communities, and research has been proceeding on environmentally-sensitive ways to effectively implement restoration treatments. While site-specific conditions must always be carefully considered, general examples of ecologically appropriate restoration efforts include: cutting and burning trees out of invaded grasslands and meadows; thinning and prescribed burning of ponderosa pine forests to reduce the density of understory trees; and thinning younger piñon and juniper from thick woodlands, using the slash to mulch the eroding interspaces between remnant trees. One outcome of such restoration efforts would be a shift in ecological dominance back toward the natural pattern of more abundant herbaceous vegetation in most local ecosystems. While not the primary motivation for most ecosystem restoration efforts, it is possible that the widespread restoration of enhanced grassy vegetation could help resolve persistent range management conflicts on public lands by providing additional grazing capacity on upland settings, away from the environmental conflicts associated with grazing in riparian zones.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent an official position of the USGS.

Follow these links back to:
Introduction
Tree and Shrub Invasion of Open Grasslands
Tales That Trees Tell
Fires in the Forests: Then and Now