[APWG] war on weeds & cheatgrass article

[Craig Dremann]

Dear Bob and All,

Thanks for your email.  For some reason, I didn't see either my
cheatgrass comments or your comments get posted on the APWG list?

Below is the most recent article about cheatgrass by the AP writer in
Boise.  

I'm sure this weed issue will be a hot topic, as long as they have
cheatgrass plus massive fires during a drought, here in the arid West 
<http://www.drought.unl.edu/dm/monitor.html>

I'm hoping that other professionals will provide some estimates of
managing the 200+ million acres so that the cheatgrass doesn't cause so
many fires in the Great Basin.  $20 billion each year, for the next 20
years is what my estimate is.

Sincerely,  Craig Dremann, Redwood City, CA (650) 325-7333

-------------------------

By JOHN MILLER
Associated Press Writer

   BOISE, Idaho (AP) _ A short walk into the Rocky Mountain West's
sagebrush sea offers a primer on the grip that cheatgrass has on these
vast open spaces. Its sharp, serrated seeds cling to hikers' socks. They
jab the eyes of hunting dogs plunging through the brush.

   And while the arid landscape around Salt Lake City or the Snake River
Plain in southern Idaho was once called "the asbestos area" because it
rarely burned, the landscape is now filling with cheatgrass _ and it's
burning.

   "Cheatgrass is changing the West," said Mike Pellant, a U.S. Bureau
of Land Management ecologist in Boise and coordinator of the Great Basin
Restoration Project that aims to limit the spread of nonnative plants in
Idaho, Nevada, Utah, eastern Oregon and northern California.

   Western governors including C.L "Butch" Otter from Idaho, Jon
Huntsman of Utah and Jim Gibbons of Nevada this week pledged a new
"pilot project" to combat this foreign invader from the Central Asian
steppe, whose rapid spread is blamed for intensifying millions of acres
of wildfires in their states this year. The vast Murphy Complex
wildfires on the Idaho-Nevada border cost $9 million to fight, while the
311,000-acre Milford Flats wildfire in June was one of Utah's largest.

   Cheatgrass seeds arrived in America starting in the mid-1800s as
stowaways on ships. As settlers advanced westward, it did too; it was
kicked with dirty straw from livestock rail cars and established a
beachhead along train tracks.

   And while cheatgrass is limited in places like southern Russia by
more aggressive plants, the West's bunchgrass and sage desert is
defenseless: cheatgrass produces hundreds of pounds of seed per acre,
overwhelming native grasses. Meanwhile, unregulated 19th- and early
20th-century sheep, cattle and horse grazing eliminated many plants that
historically grew beneath sagebrush, leaving even more room for
cheatgrass to take hold.

   Cheatgrass also dries by June, earlier than native grasses, meaning
lots of fine fuel at the fire season's apex.

   "With cheatgrass, you see fire year-in, year-out," Huntsman said
Monday. "That's totally unacceptable."

   By Sept. 1, the governors aim to have their plan in place, to
identify burned areas in their respective states for model
rehabilitation programs.

   To succeed, some scientists argue they must rely on nonnative species
from Siberia such as crested wheatgrass _ instead of using natives like
bluebunch wheatgrass. Jim Young, a U.S. Department of Agriculture
Research Service scientist in Reno, Nev., has worked for 43 years to
combat cheatgrass with native species. He no longer believes it's
possible.

   If managers focus on native grasses, "they don't have a prayer,"
Young said. "We've got a bleeding environment right now, and crested
wheatgrass is the 'Band-Aid' to fix it."

   That sentiment doesn't sit well with environmentalists aiming to end
grazing on the West's public lands. They argue BLM managers plant
fast-growing crested wheatgrass because it's favored as livestock
forage. They want native plants back, to help species such as sage
grouse.

   "It (the region's sage desert) is crashing, and the crash, caused by
grazing and seeding of exotic cattle forage grasses for ranchers, often
as part of failed fire policy in the past, has caused this collapse,"
Katie Fite of the Western Watersheds Project said in an e-mail.

   Meanwhile, ranchers blame environmentalists like Fite and the federal
courts for keeping them from what they say were historic grazing
practices that reduced cheatgrass, native grasses and sagebrush,
prevented wildfires and still maintained wildlife habitat.

   "Now we've done a good job of growing grass," said Mike Guerry, one
of the region's Basque ranchers whose family has run sheep and cattle on
the Idaho-Nevada border since 1909. "And we've done a poor job of
utilizing the feed that's out there."

   Even outside the political realm, the challenges are daunting: In the
Great Basin alone, a third of the BLM's 75 million acres have been
overrun by cheatgrass, managers say, at a time when there's too little
manpower, equipment or native grass seed, especially in big fire years.

   The BLM seed warehouse in Boise can store nearly a million pounds of
sagebrush, wheatgrass or bottlebrush squirreltail seeds that arrive in
shrink-wrapped bags by the truckload from commercial seed companies.
Still, that's not enough. To reseed just a third of the 650,000 acres
charred by the Murphy blazes in Idaho and Nevada, some 1.4 million
pounds would be needed, at roughly 7 pounds of seed per acre.

   What's more, drought and record temperatures this year also have
slashed seed production of native plants in areas that haven't yet
burned. That could be a big hurdle for the hundreds of volunteers the
governors aim to send into the desert to collect seeds this year as part
of their restoration plan.

  "With the heat and the drought, a lot of the West's wildland plants
aren't producing much seed," said Scott Lambert, the BLM's seed
warehouse manager. "That could be a limiting factor."
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