by Ed Grumbine, Lands Director
Why would a group of 24 otherwise sane adults spend their weekend sprawled across damp ground counting hard-to-identify grasses under threatening skies with another rainsquall just a shot away?
The answer, like most questions I grapple with as manager of the Grand Canyon Trust’s North Rim Ranches Program, is both simple and complex. As a member of that volunteer team inventorying plants on the Kaibab Plateau north of the Grand Canyon, let me share the complex answer first.
The Trust sponsors a host of research projects on the North Rim, all designed to help us get a handle on how to better protect and manage the land. Defining sustainable grazing, reducing the risk of damaging wildfires, restoring springs—these are some of our current concerns. But the most difficult problem we face may be one species of non-native grass that has vexed ranchers, public land lovers and land managers alike for decades.
That species is Bromus tectorum, cheatgrass. Cheatgrass arrived from Eurasia over a century ago and has now infested some 60-80 million acres of the West. For comparison, consider that this represents about 70 percent of the total area of California. This annual grass originally moved in to overgrazed areas and then used its autumn germination, rapid root growth and prolific seed productivity to outcompete native grasses and change the face of many Western ecosystems. Already by the 1940s, Aldo Leopold was asking whether cheatgrass was “a necessary evil, to be lived with until kingdom come.” Given its vast range, and the fact that it has continued to negatively impact soil, water, fire and nutrient cycles, the answer is “yes”.
This was the question our Trust volunteer group was helping to address on that rainy recent weekend. The team, comprised of Prescott College’s Grand Canyon Seminar class, was assisting Dr. Lauren Porensky, the principle investigator for the Greenstrips project on the North Rim Ranches who works for the federal Agricultural Research Service in Fort Collins, Colorado. Billions of dollars have been spent on controlling cheatgrass to little avail, but Lauren and her colleagues have a triple threat approach to simultaneously tackle three issues that keep cheatgrass dominant.
Lauren’s plan is all about:
All of these treatments have been tried with little success, but no one has attempted to combine them into one prescription.
That was our job, working under Laurens’ direction—but only if we could handle the rigors of identifying and counting thousands of individual grasses, scrupulously recording results on damp data sheets, and scrunching ourselves over, around and through the brushy remnant regrowth from the Slide Fire of 2006.
(Prescott College students counting and identifying grasses)
“Six out!” Lauren’s assistant Owen Baughman hollered to our 10, two-member crews while we noted the plot location on our data sheets. Each team hunkered down, and, using a plastic quadrat placed at intervals to the right and left of a 50 meter fixed line, we began to tally grasses found within the sample areas. Field science is an odd mix of precision and randomness. You generate random locations for plots to reduce subjective bias when sampling, but within your plot, you must be anything but random when collecting the data.
“What species is this?” Mark held up a 4-inch seedling. Only an experienced grassland ecologist could identify such a nondescript plant, but Lauren and Owen were up to the task—and they were fine teachers as well.
Lauren pointed to the base of the grass stem. “See these tiny ears of tissue clasping the stem down here?” she asked. “That’s how you tell Elymus from Poa. It’s not too tough if you know what you are looking for.”
“Yeah, I can see it now,” replied Mark. “It’s all about you showing me where to look; then it’s clear.” He bent back down to his plot frame and began to count how many dried cheatgrass individuals were clustered within the space marked from 0 to 10 centimeters inside the white plastic tubing. “Seventeen, eighteen, ahh..., twenty-one total in this one,” he said. “It seems like there is less cheatgrass where the soil is more rocky, do you see that?”
“Maybe,” replied Lauren. “We won’t know ‘til we tally all the results from all the plots, then run statistical analyses on the numbers. But I do see that. One key will be the spacing of our native grass plantings and if the data shows an effect on controlling cheatgrass. And remember, this sample is coming from a control site that is paired with a plot where we planted greenstrips this past spring. We didn’t do anything on this plot. You’re sampling a control to compare conditions in the plots where we did do something.”
This past June, Lauren led a planting trip with volunteers from the Trust to seed the greenstrip plots next to the control areas where we were currently working. That team used seed aggregated into pellets, specially coated with water uptake-enhancing chemicals and beneficial nutrients to be used by the young grasses upon germination. These coatings were innovations developed in the lab and were now being tested in the field. Would the coatings give the seedlings a leg-up over cheatgrass? It was too soon to tell, but our data could provide some clues.
The third prong of the greenstrips experiment was going to be the most complex to manage. Introducing cattle into the planted plots at just the right time to graze and knock back cheatgrass would require cooperation with Justun Jones, the rancher who runs cows on North Rim lands in partnership with the Trust. Justun is the savviest partner a scientist could wish for, and he was on board with Lauren and her crew of graduate students. But this third piece of the experiment would not be implemented until spring of 2016, when cheatgrass would provide tasty early season forage for Justun’s cows.
“Who’s paying for all this?” asked Joel Barnes, the instructor leading the Prescott College class. Our team had just completed another transect sample and was taking a break.
“Well,” replied Lauren, “there’s no way anyone has enough money to do this everywhere in the West. But we don’t need to do that. The cool thing about greenstrips is that they can be planted in the most strategic locations where controlling cheatgrass’ spread into new habitat is most critical, or where fire risk is highest. If we get good results here, we won’t have to scale up plantings to every place that cheatgrass grows. Greenstrips may allow us to be more strategic about how and where we choose to put our limited resources.”
It was time to sample another plot, and the group went back to work just as the sky darkened and drops of rain began to fall. Despite the weather, the mood in the team was light. And that leads me to share the simple answer to the question of why we were here helping Lauren search for answers about cheatgrass.
Scrunch down to count a tiny blade of grass. Notice the beauty of its slender stalk. See? There are two tissues wrapping the stem just above the ground- that means it’s Elymus. Note that on your data sheet. Enjoy the teamwork of field research with a partner; you can’t count grasses and write down results at the same time. Glance up from your work to watch the weather. The wind from a storm cell is rattling yellow oak leaves, and autumn is blowing in. But we are lucky; it isn’t raining much on us. It is good to be right here on top of this high plateau that the locals call “the mountain.” It’s good to care about what happens to this place, to work with others to help fix a problem. When you put your feelings into your work, it makes a difference. It’s good to care for this land.
The simple answer is love.
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