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Map of Row Crops Produced in NOBO Range
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Row crop production within WLFW Northern bobwhite, Grasslands, and Savannas framework boundaries.
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Maps and Spatial Data
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WLFW Northern bobwhite, Grasslands, and Savannas Framework - Partners’ webinar 3/2/2022
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On March 2, 2022 Bridgett Costanzo of NRCS's Working Lands for Wildlife and Jessica McGuire of QF presented on the WLFW framework for NOBO, grasslands and savannas. Ms. Costanzo presented on the content of the new framework document, the priority areas and conservation practice goals set by the 24 NRCS state offices, and responses received from the needs assessment survey. Ms. McGuire presented on staffing and monitoring plans associated with launching this framework.
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Training Resources
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Webinars and Instructional Videos
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Grazing Management Minute: Establishing Native Warm Season Grasses
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In ODA's latest Grazing Management Minute, join Quail Forever's Jason Jones and Clinton County farmer Nathan Rice to learn more about establishing native warm season grasses.
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Webinars and Instructional Videos
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Evolution of Grasses and Grassland Ecosystems
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The evolution and subsequent ecological expansion of grasses (Poaceae) since the Late Cretaceous have resulted in the establishment of one of Earth’s dominant biomes, the temperate and tropical grasslands, at the expense of forests. In the past decades, several new approaches have been applied to the fossil record of grasses to elucidate the patterns and processes of this ecosystem transformation. The data indicate that the development of grassland ecosystems on most continents was a multistage process involving the Pale- ogene appearance of (C3 and C4) open-habitat grasses, the mid-late Cenozoic spread of C3 grass-dominated habitats, and, finally, the Late Neogene expansion of C4 grasses at tropical-subtropical latitudes. The evolution of herbivores adapted to grasslands did not necessarily coincide with the spread of open-habitat grasses. In addition, the timing of these evolutionary and ecological events varied between regions. Consequently, region-by-region investigations using both direct (plant fossils) and indirect (e.g., stable carbon isotopes, faunas) evidence are required for a full understanding of the tempo and mode of grass and grassland evolution.
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Climate Science Documents
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Climatic variability and episodic Pinus ponderosa establishment along the forest-grassland ecotones of Colorado
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The primary objective of this study was the detection of possible climatic influences on the recent (i.e., past c. 40 years) establishment of ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) at or near forest-grassland ecotones in the northern Front Range of Colorado. Germination dates were precisely determined for >500 juvenile ponderosa pine collected in six widely dispersed sample areas. All sites sampled were open areas lacking an overstory tree cover but located near seed sources. To evaluate the effects of recent climatic variation on recruitment and survival patterns, three types of climate data were used: (1) instrumental climate records from nearby local weather stations; (2) a multivariate index of El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO); and (3) a regional, ponderosa pine tree-ring index sensitive to moisture variation. There is a strong association between episodic recruitment of ponderosa pine and years in which spring and fall moisture availability is high in the instrumental climate record. During the past 40 years, tree establishment was highly episodic and concentrated mainly in four years—1973, 1979, 1983, and 1990. These years are also associated with large-scale warming of sea-surface temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific (i.e., El Nin ̃o events). These years of abundant seedling establishment also coincide with years of above average radial growth in mature ponderosa pine. Thus, at open sites suitable for the survival of shade-intolerant ponderosa pine, successful establishment of seedlings is highly episodic depending on local moisture availability related to broad-scale climatic variation. This study demonstrates the climatic sensitivity of ponderosa pine recruitment at low elevation sites along forest-grassland ecotones in the northern Colorado Front Range.
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Climate Science Documents
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Changes in forest productivity across Alaska consistent with biome shift
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Global vegetation models predict that boreal forests are particularly sensitive to a biome shift during the 21st century. This shift would manifest itself first at the biome's margins, with evergreen forest expanding into current tundra while being replaced by grasslands or temperate forest at the biome's southern edge. We evaluated changes in forest productivity since 1982 across boreal Alaska by linking satellite estimates of primary productivity and a large tree-ring data set. Trends in both records show consistent growth increases at the boreal–tundra ecotones that contrast with drought-induced productivity declines throughout interior Alaska. These patterns support the hypothesized effects of an initiating biome shift. Ultimately, tree dispersal rates, habitat availability and the rate of future climate change, and how it changes disturbance regimes, are expected to determine where the boreal biome will undergo a gradual geographic range shift, and where a more rapid decline.
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Climate Science Documents
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Climate change and the invasion of California by grasses
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Over the next century, changes in the global climate are expected to have major consequences for plant communities, possibly including the exacerbation of species invasions. We evaluated this possibility in the grass flora of California, which is economically and ecologically important and heavily invaded. We used a novel, trait-based approach involving two components: identifying differences in trait composition between native and exotic components of the grass flora and evaluating contemporary trait–climate relationships across the state. The combination of trait–climate relationships and trait differences between groups allows us to predict changes in the exotic-native balance under climate change scenarios. Exotic species are more likely to be annual, taller, with larger leaves, larger seeds, higher specific leaf area, and higher leaf N percentage than native species. Across the state, all these traits are associated with regions with higher temperature. Therefore, we predict that increasing temperatures will favor trait states that tend to be possessed by exotic species, increasing the dominance of exotic species. This prediction is corroborated by the current distribution of exotic species richness relative to native richness in California; warmer areas contain higher proportions of exotic species. This pattern was very well captured by a simple model that predicts invasion severity given only the trait–climate relationship for native species and trait differences between native and exotic species. This study provides some of the first evidence for an important interaction between climate change and species invasions across very broad geographic and taxonomic scales.
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Climate Science Documents
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CO2 emissions from land-use change affected more by nitrogen cycle, than by the choice of land-cover data
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The high uncertainty in land-based CO2 fluxes estimates is thought to be mainly due to uncertainty in not only quantifying historical changes among forests, croplands, and grassland, but also due to different processes included in calculation methods. Inclusion of a nitrogen (N) cycle in models is fairly recent and strongly affects carbon (C) fluxes. In this study, for the first time, we use a model with C and N dynamics with three distinct historical reconstructions of land-use and land-use change (LULUC) to quantify LULUC emissions and uncertainty that includes the integrated effects of not only climate and CO2 but also N. The modeled global average emissions including N dynamics for the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000–2005 were 1.8 ` 0.2, 1.7 ` 0.2, and 1.4 ` 0.2 GtC yr␣1, respectively, (mean and range across LULUC data sets). The emissions from tropics were 0.8 ` 0.2, 0.8 ` 0.2, and 0.7 ` 0.3 GtC yr␣1, and the non tropics were 1.1 ` 0.5, 0.9 ` 0.2, and 0.7 ` 0.1 GtC yr␣1. Compared to previous studies that did not include N dynamics, modeled net LULUC emissions were higher, particularly in the non tropics. In the model, N limitation reduces regrowth rates of vegetation in temperate areas resulting in higher net emissions. Our results indicate that exclusion of N dynamics leads to an underestimation of LULUC emissions by around 70% in the non tropics, 10% in the tropics, and 40% globally in the 1990s. The differences due to inclusion/exclusion of the N cycle of 0.1 GtC yr␣1 in the tro- pics, 0.6 GtC yr␣1 in the non tropics, and 0.7 GtC yr␣1 globally (mean across land-cover data sets) in the 1990s were greater than differences due to the land-cover data in the non tropics and globally (0.2 GtC yr␣1). While land-cover information is improving with satellite and inventory data, this study indicates the importance of accounting for different processes, in particular the N cycle.
Keywords: carbon cycle, carbon emissions, land-use change, model, nitrogen cycle
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Annual plants change in size over a century of observations
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Abstract
Studies have documented changes in animal body size over the last century, but very little is known about changes in plant sizes, even though reduced plant productivity is potentially responsible for declines in size of other organisms. Here, I ask whether warming trends in the Great Basin have affected plant size by measuring specimens preserved on herbarium sheets collected between 1893 and 2011. I asked how maximum and minimum temperatures, precipitation, and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) in the year of collection affected plant height, leaf size, and flower number, and asked whether changes in climate resulted in decreasing sizes for seven annual forbs. Species had contrasting responses to climate factors, and would not necessarily be expected to respond in parallel to climatic shifts. There were generally positive relationships between plant size and increased minimum and maximum temperatures, which would have been predicted to lead to small increases in plant sizes over the observation period. While one species increased in size and flower number over the observation period, five of the seven species decreased in plant height, four of these decreased in leaf size, and one species also decreased in flower production. One species showed no change. The mechanisms behind these size changes are unknown, and the limited data available on these species (germination timing, area of occupancy, relative abundance) did not explain why some species shrank while others grew or did not change in size over time. These results show that multiple annual forbs are decreasing in size, but that even within the same functional group, species may have contrasting responses to similar environmental stimuli. Changes in plant size could have cascading effects on other members of these communities, and differential responses to directional change may change the composition of plant communities over time.
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Effects of grazing on grassland soil carbon: a global review
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Soils of grasslands represent a large potential reservoir for storing CO2, but this potential likely depends on how grasslands are managed for large mammal grazing. Previous studies found both strong positive and negative grazing effects on soil organic carbon (SOC) but explanations for this variation are poorly developed. Expanding on previous reviews, we performed a multifactorial meta-analysis of grazer effects on SOC density on 47 independent experimen- tal contrasts from 17 studies. We explicitly tested hypotheses that grazer effects would shift from negative to positive with decreasing precipitation, increasing fineness of soil texture, transition from dominant grass species with C3 to C4 photosynthesis, and decreasing grazing intensity, after controlling for study duration and sampling depth. The six variables of soil texture, precipitation, grass type, grazing intensity, study duration, and sampling depth explained 85% of a large variation (`150 g m␣2 yr␣1) in grazing effects, and the best model included significant interactions between precipitation and soil texture (P = 0.002), grass type, and grazing intensity (P = 0.012), and study duration and soil sampling depth (P = 0.020). Specifically, an increase in mean annual precipitation of 600 mm resulted in a 24% decrease in grazer effect size on finer textured soils, while on sandy soils the same increase in precipitation pro- duced a 22% increase in grazer effect on SOC. Increasing grazing intensity increased SOC by 6–7% on C4-dominated and C4–C3 mixed grasslands, but decreased SOC by an average 18% in C3-dominated grasslands. We discovered these patterns despite a lack of studies in natural, wildlife-dominated ecosystems, and tropical grasslands. Our results, which suggest a future focus on why C3 vs. C4-dominated grasslands differ so strongly in their response of SOC to grazing, show that grazer effects on SOC are highly context-specific and imply that grazers in different regions might be managed differently to help mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.
Keywords: carbon sequestration, grasslands, grazing, grazing intensity, precipitation, soil organic carbon, soil texture
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