Viewpoint: An Alternative Management Paradigm for Plant Communities Affected by Invasive Annual Grass in the Intermountain West

Abstract

On the Ground • Over 400,000 km2 of the Intermountain West is colonized by cheatgrass and other annual grasses. • Planning and management actions designed to foster perennial grass health throughout the region have never addressed how annual grasses would respond. • For decades, the most significant landscape-level management approach toward invasive annual grasses has been to complain. • We now know how to begin the process of taking the Intermountain West back from the domination of invasive annual grasses: through the management of standing dead litter. • Sustaining perennial bunchgrasses at landscape scales will require an integrated ecological approach to fuels management.