Posts Tagged: cheatgrass

Invasive grasses exacerbate wildfire at regional scales: we need regional efforts to manage them

New research published in PNAS (Fusco et al 2019) highlights the role of invasive grasses in creating new wildfire regimes at not just local but regional scales. Weed scientists are familiar with the concept of the grass-fire cycle (D'Antonio and Vitousek 1992): exotic grass invasions promote...

California’s bad romance with Bromus fuels wildfire

When wildfires burn in California, people often call them forest fires or brushfires, but the odds are high that an invasive weed is an unrecognized fuels component, says a UC Agriculture and Natural Resources scientist. “We have all of the nasty non-native Bromus species here in California,...

Cheatgrass: How many impacts can one species have?

There was a post written a few months ago by Rebecca Ozeran entitled “A Tale of Two Grasses,” describing her experiences with cheatgrass and contrasting its characteristics with another invasive annual, medusahead. It was an excellently written blog, and I encourage you to check it...

A Tale of Two Grasses

As you can tell by going through archived blogs on this site, medusahead (Taeniatherum caput-medusae) is an extremely popular grass. Well, an infamous one, perhaps. I am fairly certain that none of us actually like it. In this blog I will add to the plethora of medusahead posts; but first, a public...

Cheating cheatgrass: new research to control a wily invasive weed

Abstract: Cheatgrass and its cousin, red brome, are exotic annual grasses that have invaded and altered ecosystem dynamics in more than 41 million acres of desert shrublands between the Rockies and the Cascade-Sierra chain. A fungus naturally associated with these Bromus species has been found...

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