Sagebrush Steppe Treatment Evaluation Project (SageSTEP): the Need for Long-term Monitoring

SageSTEP is a long-term management experiment that evaluates alternative methods of sagebrush steppe restoration at multiple sites in the Interior West. Between 2006 and 2008, SageSTEP scientists and their manager partners implemented alternative fuel treatments to reduce woody vegetation -- prescribed fire, clearcutting, mastication, mowing, herbicides -- at 18 study sites, and have studied treatment response in the herbaceous vegetation, the fuel bed, soils, water resources, erosion and runoff, wildlife, and invertebrates. With this poster, we report on short-term results (3-4 years post-treatment) of restoration treatments, with a focus on what the results say about the temporal trajectories of key variables through time. For example, our work indicates that when trees are removed from highly encroached woodlands, as many as 27 days of extra spring soil water becomes available for understory vegetation growth, and we project that it will require 10 years of elapsed time before this extra soil water is seized by new vegetative growth. It is thus apparent that in order to predict the longer-term outcomes of restoration treatments, we will require at least 10 years of post-treatment monitoring. Other variables that will require longer term monitoring include the fuel bed, sage-obligate bird communities, insect biodiversity, and runoff/erosion.