Putting Resilience and Resistance Concepts into Practice
This fact sheet is designed to assist land managers in using resilience and resistance concepts to assess risks, prioritize management activities, and select appropriate treatments that conserve and restore the sagebrush sea.
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Great Basin Fact Sheet No. 1: Putting Resilience and Resistance Concepts into Practice
By: Jeanne Chambers, Jeremy Maestas, and Mike Pellant
Summary:
Land managers are increasingly interested in improving resilience to disturbances, such as wildfire, and resistance to invasive species, such as cheatgrass and medusahead. This factsheet is designed to assist land managers in using resilience and resistance concepts to assess risks, prioritize management activities, and select appropriate treatments.
In Brief:
- Resilience and resistance concepts help managers understand key drivers of ecosystem change, identify relative risks of crossing thresholds to undesired states, and design appropriate management actions.
- An understanding of the relationships of environmental characteristics to vegetation types and their inherent resilience and resistance gives us the capacity to assess risks and prioritize management actions across large landscapes.
- Management tools such as Ecological Site Descriptions (ESDs) and state and transition models (STMs) give us the capacity to evaluate a sites’ resilience and resistance when coupled with field surveys.
Click here or on the image below to download a PDF of the full fact sheet.
This fact sheet is part of the Great Basin Fact Sheet Series compiled collaboratively by WAFWA, USFS, BLM, NRCS, RMRS, ARS, USGS, and FWS. The series provides land managers with brief summaries of current science concepts and management strategies related to conservation and restoration of the sagebrush sea.
