ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF CROSS-SCALE INTERACTIONS IN RANGELAND SHRUB MANAGEMENT OUTCOMES

The overarching goal of this project is to quantify cross-scale factors impacting the plant community response following woody plant encroachment (WPE) management to improve predictability in dryland WPE restoration outcomes. This will be accomplished by modeling plant community data in response to drivers of ecosystem change from the patch scale (i.e., between-plant soil erosion with increasing bare ground) to the landscape scale (i.e., land management, weather) across a grassland to shrubland gradient in the northern Chihuahuan Desert.Two objectives will be addressed to reach this goal:Objective 1: Evaluate the plant community response to WPE management and climatic factors across a shrub encroachment gradient. Plant functional group abundances will be modeled in response to herbicide treatment (applied for WPE management), seasonal precipitation and temperature data, and pre-treatment encroachment severity to quantify the importance of these variables in predicting post-treatment outcomes across the encroachment gradient.Objective 2: Test the efficacy of Connectivity Modifiers (ConMods) to aid herbaceous species recovery within shrub interspaces alongside herbicide treatment. Accelerated erosion with shrub encroachment can reduce the likelihood of herbaceous species re-establishment even after WPE is managed, which will be examined by modeling plant functional group abundance in shrub interspaces with and without ConMods in combination with plots and treated and untreated with herbicide.