Seeding Evaluation and Experimental Design Strategies (SEEDS) partnership: Co-producing landscape- scale revegetation experiments embedded into post-fire seedings in the Great Basin and Intermountain West

In addition to the essential challenges of restoring dryland habitats, and despite nearly a century of post-fire seeding, only a small set of possible post-fire seeding treatments have ever been tried. Every rangeland fire and post-fire seeding project offers an opportunity to test and compare novel and innovative treatments. This can be accomplished by creating “leave areas” within each burn perimeter where experimental treatments would be embedded and tested by an independently funded research team working with land managers and without unnecessarily encumbering local funding, staff time, or priorities. 

Photo Credit

USDA photo by Francis Kilkenny

By pairing land management treatments and scientific experimentation, we can rapidly advance restoration practice by finding novel seeding treatments that work. The Bureau of Land Management has provided the Principle Investigators and SEEDS project team with seed money to develop a Master Study Design that outlines a framework for rapidly determining gaps in post-fire treatment design knowledge, defining a process to build-in innovative treatment designs into landscape-scale experiments, establish a holistic and fully cross-comparable monitoring plan, explicitly link design and monitoring findings to both common and understudied management goals (such as soil stabilization, prevention and eradication of invasive species, increased biodiversity, and increased ecosystem function), and to install two pilot post-fire seeding treatment experiments to work out kinks in the process. We are currently developing the Master Study Design, have developed multiple local and regional partnerships with land managers, and will begin seeding treatment installations after the 2023 fire season. We plan to implement additional experiments, establish and equip an on-the-ground monitoring team for an additional three years (through 2026), and expand our collaborative partnerships. The eventual goal of this project is to develop an expansive team of experts that will design and assess analytically tractable seeding treatments, implemented by the researchers and/or by federal, state, tribal and private land managers, in every significant rangeland fire in the Great Basin and Intermountain West, to propel a constant learning process and true adaptive management. 

Objectives 

This project will jumpstart rapid learning from post-fire seeding. A team of researchers and managers is developing a framework for implementing novel post-fire seeding treatments in grasslands, shrublands, and low elevation conifer savannahs in the Great Basin and Intermountain West. This will occur by working with local Bureau of Land Management Emergency Stabilization and Rehabilitation and USDA Forest Service Burned Area Emergency Response teams to define “leave areas” where novel treatment experiments will be embedded, leading to rapid learning, emergent lessons, and true adaptive management.

Expected Project Results 

A. Outputs:

We expect the following outputs: 

1. Master Study Design to coordinate innovative post-fire treatment design and implementation
2. Establishment of at least six landscape-scale long-term post-fire seeding treatment experiments
3. Very large datasets on post-fire seeding treatment experiments, including biotic and abiotic causes and effects
4. Appropriate progress reports through 2026
5. Direct communication of and consultation on findings with all partners and the public, including co-production with ESR and BAER teams
6. Three or more conference presentations
7. Five or more journal articles relaying findings
8. Exploration of online tool options to make lessons learned as widely available as possible,
9. Development of a long-term process to continue embedding experiments in post-fire seedings to speed-up and reinforce adaptive management

B. Expected Outcomes: 

We aim to: 

1. Establish protocols and frameworks for implementing treatment designs that fill knowledge gaps and are analytically comparable across multiple treatment experiments to find emergent lessons
2. Develop expertise within implementation and monitoring teams and additional partnerships to generate continuous learning
3. Determine which species, seed sources, preparation technologies, mix compositions, seeding rates, implementation timing, seeding equipment, site preparation techniques, and other potential treatment factors increase plant community restoration success- defined as soil stabilization, prevention and eradication of invasive species, increased biodiversity, increased ecosystem function and other understudied management goals
4. Speed-up learning and revolutionize revegetation techniques in the Great Basin and the Intermountain West to make land management activities more effective in the face of global change

C. Metrics of Success:

Metrics of success will include:

1. The completion of a Master Study Design
2. Establishment of communication frameworks with local ESR and BAER teams for pre-loading embedded projects
3. Successful implementation and monitoring of initial pilot projects
4. Continued implementation capacity, effective communication and co-production, and the ability to monitor established experiments over the long-term
5. The establishment of novel landscape-level on-the-ground treatments that can serve as examples for future revegetation efforts
6. The development of long-term datasets for future learning
7. Within experiment and large cross-study analyses to find emergent lessons

Geographies and High-Risk Landscapes to be Addressed

This proposal guides and performs revegetation on high fire risk areas across the Intermountain West, including Southwest Idaho, Central Oregon Landscape, Wasatch, Sierra and Elko Fronts, and Central Washington Initiative, with peripheral application to several other High Risk Fire Landscapes such as the Klamath River Basin and Colorado Front Range.