Study: Grazing mitigates fire damage

A 14-year study by federal researchers in Eastern Oregon determined that cattle grazing can protect and help rangelands recover more effectively from fires. Three scientists at the Eastern Oregon Agricultural Research Center, in Burns, found that grazing can check the growth of native grasses that can fuel more intense wildfires. Grazing can thus impede the spread of cheatgrass and medusahead, invasive non-native grasses that can infect landscapes when fires devastate existing vegetation. These rangelands historically were burned by wildfires every 50 to 100 years, but fire suppression practices in the past century have allowed more dead plant litter to accumulate. In grazed areas, cattle consumed about 40 percent of the available forage, which removed much of the potential litter, according to a news release. The scientists worked with portions of an experimental range, including plots that had not been grazed since 1937. In 1993 they did a controlled burn of a strip of land that included both grazed and ungrazed segments. They then measured vegetation cover, density and biomass production in 2005, 2006 and 2007 and found that cheatgrass had infested a large portion of the ungrazed sites, leaving them more vulnerable to future fires. However, cheatgrass wasn't a problem on the sites that had been grazed. Instead, native bunchgrass cover was almost twice as dense as that on the ungrazed sites...read more