Impacts of livestock grazing on the probability of burning in wildfires vary by region and vegetation type in California

Abstract

Wildfire activity has recently increased in California, impacting ecosystems and human well-being. California's rangelands are complex social-ecological systems composed of multiple ecosystems and the people who live and work in them. Livestock grazing has been proposed as a tool for reducing wildfire activity. Here, we explore how grazing affects wildfire at large spatial scales, assessing burn probability on rangelands with different grazing levels. We collected grazing data by surveying 140 large private landowners in three social-ecological regions: California's North Bay, Central Coast, and Central Valley and Foothills. Using pre-regression matching and mixed effects regression, we calculate the burn probability from 2001 to 2017 in points sampled from grazed and ungrazed properties in each region in grasslands, shrub/scrublands, and forests. We find that in the Central Coast and North Bay, annual burn probability decreases as stocking levels increase across all vegetation types, with reductions of 0.008–0.036. In the Central Valley and Foothills, the relationship is complex, with burn probability increasing over some grazing levels and variations in the effect of higher stocking densities. Our results indicate that livestock grazing may reduce annual burn probability in some regions and ecosystems in California, providing the first large-scale assessment of this relationship.