University of Nevada, Reno gets $1 million for fire research
Resource economist to help find most cost-effective methods for natural resource protection
The University of Nevada, Reno will receive $1 million for research aimed at providing federal land managers with the information they need to choose the most effective treatments to save sagebrush communities from catastrophic fires and invasive weeds.
Kim Rollins, associate professor of resource economics in the College of Agriculture, Biotechnology and Natural Resources, said that the money will be used to help researchers determine how to best use resources in treating Great Basin lands for fire and weed control.
Approved recently by the Department of Interior's Joint Fire Science Program, Rollins will lead a team of economists from University of Idaho and Oregon State University. She is joined by Dale Johnson at Nevada's Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Science, who will be investigating treatment impacts on soils.
Rollins said the economists' role is to prioritize the options for which treatments to apply, and where and when to apply them. Treatments include herbicides on cheatgrass, mechanical treatments and controlled burns. Other researchers in a multidisciplinary team from 10 universities and federal agencies will test different treatment methods.
"Of course we would like to protect everything," Rollins said. "But the reality is we have only so many resources, so many land managers and annual budgets of certain amounts."
Given these constraints, the economists have to consider the values of different lands. Rollins said some lands are close to human populations, some are more valuable for livestock forage and others are valuable for the protection of endangered spices and habitats.
The Great Basin's sagebrush community occupies 100 million acres in the West. It is the largest biome - or ecological plant community - in North America. Home to more than 300 wildlife species, the biome is the primary forage base for the western livestock industry.
Unfortunately, the sagebrush biome is considered to be one of the most endangered in the United States as a result of the invasion of exotic weeds such as cheatgrass, Rollins said.
Invasive species become highly flammable fuel amid the native sagebrush, resulting in increased frequency and intensity of wildfires that threaten not only the sagebrush communities, but also properties, wildlife and human lives. Scientists estimate that a third of the biome has been lost, and as much as half in the Great Basin region.
The $1 million awarded to Nevada is part of $13 million for the overall project, which involves ecologists, wildlife biologists, soil scientists, hydrologists, sociologists as well as economists from various institutions around the Great Basin. The list includes the University of Nevada, Reno, Oregon State University, Utah State University, Brigham Young University, University of Idaho, the US Geological Survey and the USDA Forest Service.
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