Fire risk

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>> Welcome to the Art of Range, a podcast focused on rangelands and the people who manage them. I'm your host, Tip Hudson, Range and Livestock Specialist with Washington State University Extension. The goal of this podcast is education and conservation through conversation. Find us online at artofrange.com.

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Welcome to part two in our important two-part series on soil carbon change in response to fire and exotic annual grass invasion. Joining me for this series are Matt Germino, Toby Maxwell, and Harry Quick. In our interview outline, you point out that there are limitations in relying on remotely sensed data for carbon estimation. What are some of those data sets and what are they currently being used for and what are the limitations? And then we can get to talking about sort of a management response and practical implications.

>> Well, for anybody that's been to like Society of Range Management or other smaller regional meetings on rangelands or grazing, there's an increasing interest in carbon accounting. And the challenge here is that our rangelands tend to be really large compared to the people power we have to do inventory of things like vegetation. I mean, let's face it, even soil maps are pretty scarce for large swaths of the rangelands in the USA. Think of the whole southeast or the eastern half of Oregon, for example, has huge deficiencies in basic soil mapping. So how can we begin accounting for soil carbon? Soil carbon is difficult and expensive to measure directly, even though we accomplished it for this paper. And so people are naturally going to turn to surrogates or proxies for soil carbon. And, yes, vegetation is an important predictor of carbon. Our paper shows that in some ways. How can you know vegetation over massive areas where you don't have enough people and boots on the ground to measure it directly? Well, one option is to try to estimate it from remotely sensed imagery, such as that which is captured by satellites, such as the Landsat satellite. So Landsat is a platform that has intrigued rangeland specialists for many years because it flies regularly on, what is it, 14-day intervals or something like that. And it's been doing this since 1984. So there's a long track record of fairly uniform imagery that are accessible that allows us to begin to try to estimate the vegetation change. So that is a powerful platform. Now, translating the spectral information in that imagery to vegetation -- estimates of vegetation cover is a trick. It's not trivial to do, but there's been some huge earnest efforts to do so. One of those efforts was -- is now known as RCMAP. This is a Department of Interior effort. So RCMAP stands for Rangeland Condition -- I'm forgetting the rest of the acronym. The other one is a USDA effort known as the Rangeland Assessment Platform or RAP for short. These are used extensively and the data are readily available to the public for free online. So they've -- these -- the teams behind these products have gone to great lengths to try to democratize, if you will, and make available this information. Now, what you get from these data sources are estimates of the fractional cover of shrubs, obviously very important for carbon. Also, you get fractional estimates of perennial herbs or annual herbs. Sometimes the estimates from different sources might actually drill down to specifically exotic annual grasses. In some cases, we've seen estimates of species like cheatgrass, so very specific. Also, you get estimates of bare soil exposure. And sometimes they'll also have tree cover, which can be very important when you have species like pinyon or junipers. Those obviously store a lot of carbon above ground. Now, the user must firstly think about the accuracy of those estimates for their particular areas. And obviously, you know, the Landsat imagery is coarse. The -- each pixel is about 100 by 100 feet, 30 by 30 meters, to be exact. And if you're dealing with a small pasture that has a lot of topographic variability or a mosaic or different vegetation types, we might expect the accuracy to be challenged and maybe not adequate. In other scenarios, you might have vast, flat areas of homogeneous vegetation. In those cases, we might hope and expect that the satellite estimates of vegetation cover might be more accurate. So that's the first challenge. The second challenge is how well can soil carbon be estimated simply from the above ground vegetation? That's a trick. And in some cases, you might get a reasonably good estimation, but we need to keep in mind that the vegetation on these landscapes, for the most part, is changing, unfortunately, too rapidly. We could expect that areas that have been mapped and known to be core, intact, healthy, undisturbed vegetation are harboring more soil carbon. I think that's a pretty safe assumption. How much carbon? That's -- you can't -- I don't know if you can know that from our paper, and I don't know if there will ever be able to come up with a generic nominal estimate for how much carbon is below, let's say, intact, undisturbed sagebrush. So that's where -- it's at that point that uncertainty really begins to creep into the estimation of below-ground carbon stores from maps of vegetation cover.

>> I have one more question that you're welcome to not answer, but out of my own curiosity and because we're on the topic, I'm curious, and we're on an equal opportunity offender here. These carbon flux, you know, near-surface meteorological stations that are designed to measure the net input and output above the vegetation canopy, there's a number of fairly large efforts to do that, you know, across the country. How does that compare with these efforts to measure soil carbon?

>> Well, that's an important complementary method of assessing carbon that I expect and hope will continue. I've worked quite a bit on that myself. We have set up what are known as eddy flux towers where you can effectively measure the earth breathing CO2 in and out. And alongside that, we're also measuring water exchange and transfer of energy, like solar energy, and the different types of energy. All three of those have to be measured together in an eddy flux campaign. So the -- there's methodological challenges with all of these approaches. Firstly, though, eddy flux or eddy covariance techniques, the micro-biometeorology approaches are short term and instantaneous in nature. So each measurement is occurring literally on sub-second scales. However, those stations can be allowed to run for days, months, and years on end. Now, compare that with soil carbon. Soil carbon has been accumulating for not just days, months, years, but millennia. OK. So the soil carbon -- so, first of all, it's important to appreciate that most of the carbon is being stored below ground and that soil carbon is going to be a stable indicator of the directional trend. The eddy flux or the eddy covariance measurements, the biometeorology is making more of what we call an instantaneous measurement of what's actually happening for carbon exchange at that particular time. Now, whether or not that carbon that is being measured in the biometeorology flux is actually incorporated and stored in soil is also a different question.

>> Right.

>> I mean, a lot of the photosynthetic uptake and respiratory efflux of carbon that is measured in a biometeorology station may not register as carbon sequestered into soils. So they're operating at two different scales, both important, both important. And I'll just be honest with you, sometimes it's difficult to get the biometeorological estimates to reconcile well with the soil carbon accounting below ground.

>> OK, that's a great answer. And we can move on. Well, let's talk about some of the conclusions in terms of rangeland management. One of the statements that's been quoted a couple places where you guys have talked about this study already is that maintaining intact sagebrush steppe by protecting against the annual grass fire cycle appears to be a highly effective nature-based solution to the global greenhouse gas problem, stabilizing soil carbon in magnitudes that are relevant to the global carbon cycle. I think I like that and I agree. That's a simple way of responding to that. But, yeah, say more about that. I think people already feel like that's an important thing to do. And is this just one more reason why that has been a good idea anyway? Or does this sort of increase the amplitude of this particular steppe?

>> Yeah, Tip, I'd like to put some numbers on that because we really haven't discussed the numbers yet.

>> Yeah.

>> So in terms of actual carbon. So what the results of the study show is, you know, we're losing 21 tons of carbon per acre. And when you scale that up over the nearly million acres of sagebrush steppe that are converting to annual grass dominance each year, you get to a number of about 19 million tons of carbon. And it's nice to convert that to CO2 equivalents because that's kind of a standard unit for quantifying emissions. It's 68 million tons of CO2 equivalents per year that are being lost through these conversions. And then --

>> Matt, you can say that again because I want to make sure I got it right. You said how many tons of carbon per acre?

>> So 19 million tons of carbon across -- it's across the million acres that are converting.

>> Yeah.

>> So 21 tons per acre.

>> That's a big number.

>> Yes, it's a big number. And EPA has a very nice website for doing conversions to various equivalents. And so if we just take the equivalency to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of gasoline-powered passenger vehicles, it's equivalent to the annual emissions from 16 million gasoline-powered passenger vehicles. So that's why I think this is so compelling that, you know, we have the technology to preserve our intact rangelands and no new technology required. We just have to do it.

>> Yeah, I do think that that's quite significant, probably because I think there are plenty of people out there who would say, "Well, we can try to grow more grass," but until China stops burning coal, it's not going to make a bit of difference. But this sounds like it would make a bit of a difference.

>> Yeah, I think --

>> Avoiding the loss, I mean.

>> I think we're functioning at a pretty impressive scale, especially because drylands are often thought of these vast, unproductive deserts. And in some ways, they are unproductive, but the key word there is they're vast. And when you scale up to the area of the Great Basin or the sagebrush biome, you get these impressive numbers. And I guess I'd also like to think about this from sort of an ecological perspective. And in terms of management here, there is a lot of energy being put into thinking about how do we sequester more carbon, how do we get more carbon into the ground. There's some famous initiatives around it, four per mil. But if we really think about it, we have a huge resource here. And considering conservation of that resource in this particular case because of the scale of these disturbances, conserving that resource can have a more well-understood effect. And we know that if we prevent that loss of intact sagebrush steppe, we're preventing that loss of carbon. And we're also encouraging plant communities that are resilient and diverse and support wildlife. So there's many other sort of co-benefits that come with conserving these intact ecosystems. And it was exciting to us to find that carbon is yet another one because of all the uncertainty that surrounds potentially thinking about adding carbon to a system. And so that's a much more complex issue that also ties into some, you know, issues. If you do increase carbon in an ecosystem, there's sort of bureaucratic concerns of what if that land turns over to a different land use. So if we think about conserving this sagebrush core as a key step, then it's a much more solid, low-risk, high-reward investment in carbon.

>> Yeah, you said we tend to think of rangelands as being unproductive. But I would say, at least outside of the crowd of range nerds that we tend to run with, the impression is also that they're static. And that's definitely not the case, but it sort of looks that way because that's how we see a desert. Like it doesn't change fast, but there's more change going on than we're aware of, much of which is happening below ground. That's fascinating. And Harry, thanks for the correction about numbers. It hadn't occurred to me that we really haven't talked about any numbers yet. Were there other results that drive other implications that we haven't talked about yet?

>> To me, the most broadly applicable finding here is to just raise people's awareness that if we want to account for carbon, number one, we've got to think about how much carbon can be lost from soils and how much can be gained. And here, we've shown that these severe disturbances can bring carbon down to like a certain base level. So now we -- you know, if you're going to account for anything, you've got to have a scale. I feel like we have begun to identify the bottom of the scale, right? That's pretty valuable. We don't know what the top of the scale is yet. We don't know how much could be added into these systems through increasing the integrity of the vegetation on them. So that, for me, is particularly important insight. And then the other is to call attention to the fact that accounting for carbon needs to be more robust than it typically has been. I like to use the analogy, if you wanted to account for differences in people's wealth, like how much -- you know, we're talking about, how much carbon does an ecosystem have? Or we could ask, "Well, how much money do different people have?" If all you ever did was look at how much money is in their bank account, you would surely make erroneous conclusions about differences in wealth. And -- so, Tip, that exact analogy transfers over to if all we ever did in sagebrush steppe or rangelands was to measure carbon in the top 20 or 30 centimeters of soil or only estimate carbon above ground in the -- you know, in the vegetation stock, we'd be missing a huge part of the story and we wouldn't really understand the impacts of these disturbances or different land management actions or the benefits of restoration, for examples.

>> Yeah, this idea of trying to figure out where the top of the scale is, it seems like there's some obvious things there. Jeff Herrick has said before that there are some limitations that are somewhat fixed, namely depths to bedrock, soil texture and precipitation. But working within those, you know, what are the ways that we can drive maximum or optimum sequestration? I don't know whether or not you've read Paige Stanley's paper, you know, sort of conceptualizing patterns of grazing that maximized photosynthesis and concluding that likely if we're wanting to maximize soil carbon sequestration, maximizing photosynthesis is probably the key. And that -- you know, that includes a number of things, maintaining photosynthetic leaf area, not -- you know, not removing too much, allowing long periods of regrowth, trying to optimize ground cover in a way that protects soil temperature and maintains infiltration and water capture. Do you have any other thoughts around that, about the mechanisms to maximize sequestration to find out, you know, within the constraints of a given site, where is the top of that scale?

>> We don't know where the top of the scale is. And one of the -- I really like everything that you just said because it basically says we can work towards the top of the scale by working with the existing ecosystem components. And just fostering a healthy ecosystem, which, by the way, benefits lots of other things, like forage production for livestock and habitat for wildlife and having healthy water, carbon, and nutrient cycles or flows and energy, you know, climate energy moderation. So many people ask us about adding carbon, adding like biochar or adding compost to these ecosystems. A couple of things here. Number one, the landscapes that we deal with are huge. So massive land areas. It's probably a lot more feasible to have policy corrections or just simply maintaining policy that leads to healthy practices, which leave the plant communities in the way that we want them to be. It's a lot less feasible to load up airplanes or equipment with compost and distribute it. But more importantly, Tip, you might be surprised to know that people have tried adding compost to soils and they expected organic carbon and total carbon to increase when they did that. And surprisingly, they didn't always observe increases. In fact, it's kind of hard to find studies that measure substantial increases. And so two things. One is that that -- those findings point out to us that we still are learning. We don't know everything. There -- there's known unknowns and there's, unfortunately, unknown unknowns about the carbon cycle here. And so that's a key thing. And the findings tell us, again, that everything you just mentioned about, just simply having good land management practices that lead to so many other benefits, are probably also going to have a co-benefit in carbon sequestration. And I hope that your rangeland owners and managers can profit from that.

>> Yeah. And one of my goals, you know, writ broadly for the podcast is to give people a wide diet of information like this and people analyzing it so that they can think through it and interpret these things in light of their own observations of things that are going on in their own context. One of those is fire. And I know we could spend all day doing this and we're going to have to move along. I'd like to talk a little bit more about phase two and a few more questions about carbon market participation. But I do want to ask about fire because there's a -- one of the things that I like about my job that I've said over and over again is that I feel like I've got one foot in academia and in, you know, all of this scientific discovery that you guys are doing and one foot firmly in the real world with people whose livelihoods depend on making sound decisions on all of the things that we're talking about. And in that interface, there's a really lively and controversial conversation around fire. You know, you've got the let it burn crowd and there's some of those in academia and in the, you know, the practitioner base of ranchers. You know, there's the perspective that most North American landscapes had natural fire, that indigenous peoples created fire probably on a wider scale and potentially more frequently than we would have thought. But my own experience observing the effects of fire, particularly in sagebrush ecosystems in the Inland Northwest, is that I'm -- I don't see -- I see sometimes benefits where you get, you know, a fast-moving fire that sort of cleans off the top growth, thins out some of the woody -- you know, woody component where it's gotten thick, say where you've got sagebrush cover that exceeds, whatever, 40%, 50%, and that you get a pretty significant flush of perennial grass after fire. But, of course, it seems like maybe more often, you know, we see the negative effects that we've talked about here on the podcast over and over again where the fire is the disturbance that tips us across a threshold into a new stable but degraded state that's characterized by these exotic annual grasses that you're studying. So my inclination is very much -- and in response to reading, you know, all the same stuff that you're reading in terms of current science, my conclusion is that I think we need to limit fire or at least manage in such a way that, at a minimum, reduces the likelihood of severe damage from fire when it does happen. And again, we've talked about it before and I'm curious if you have any further thoughts on that in response to this study.

>> It varies with site conditions, I think.

>> Yeah.

>> And not just the site but what surrounds the site because fire does not obey property boundaries and neither do invasives or other things that change plant community condition and thus rangeland health. At this point, I don't think there's any ambiguity about the negative impact of both the frequency at which fires are occurring and the spatial extent at which fire is occurring in. In my mind, both of those must -- both of those are radically exceeding the adaptive capacity of the native perennial vegetation and that alone tells you that the -- you know, the size and frequency of fires that we see now is novel to these ecosystems. Just the fact that -- I mean, just look at sagebrush. How could sagebrush have become so abundant on a landscape when it has [inaudible]. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it just couldn't happen, especially over huge areas because its seed dispersal distances are so short, right? So it doesn't form a seed bank. Seed dispersal is short and it doesn't resprout. So sagebrush itself tells us a lot about the deep history of fire in these landscapes. Now, on the other hand, there are lots of areas that are now in a perennial grassland state that were once probably a little bit more mixed in terms of their relative abundance of woody and herbaceous species. And, by the way, this is one of the things we really hit on in our paper. We feel that it's an -- as an aside, we feel that it's an unfair comparison to compare carbon under cheatgrass to carbon under sagebrush because the perennial grassland state is a natural part of intact shrub steppe systems. It's a natural successionary state. And hence needs to be one of the site conditions that cheatgrass is compared against. But aside from that, Tip, I mean, a lot of the perennial -- the species that are comprising the perennial grassland states, which are seeming persistent, are fairly well adapted to fire. And, in fact, litter accumulation can be, you know, extensive enough in them that it's -- it does not seem unreasonable that disturbances such as fire would form a meaningful part of the natural ecosystem functioning in them. I mean, grasslands around the world, dry grasslands around the world, usually have fires as part of their natural functioning. What I'm saying might be somewhat controversial or even heresy to some people because the most simple thought out there right now is that we just need to avoid fire. And that's probably the simplest management strategy because having fire occurring in some but not other units of our landscape is probably not realistic because fire just tends to spread in ways that are uncontrollable and undesirable. So --

>> But here in the Inland Northwest where we have large areas that are dominated by sagebrush steppe plant communities that have, you know, a variety of spatial patterns of exotic annual grass in it and around it that pose a risk for conversion after fire, you're saying that -- the conclusion of this paper was that protecting against that cycle is one of the ways to stabilize carbon. Yeah.

>> Yeah, the money invested into fire suppression or fire control should pay good dividends in protecting especially core habitat but even areas that are designated as growth areas that have either restoration potential or restoration investments that have been made into them.

>> Right.

>> Yeah, protecting -- protect the investments into protecting them from fire are, in our view, probably well worthwhile.

>> Well, I've got a couple of questions about carbon markets. Maybe I should let you say whatever you guys had in mind about the implications of these research findings for carbon markets. That's another one of these lively and controversial conversations. I've got a couple of questions, but what are your thoughts on that first?

>> I'll start first and then pass to Harry who's much more involved in this than either Toby or I. I think the biggest implication of our paper is -- you know, the finding -- the headline finding is important but perhaps the more generalizable finding is if you want to have a market, you've got to have a measure. You've got to have a -- like a currency. The currency has to be pegged up against something measurable. The most important take-home here is we need to have sound methods of direct sampling of the soils. You know, you've got to look at the full wealth of carbon in the ecosystem. We need to look at the different depths. We need to have fair comparisons if we're looking at areas that are, you know, impacted and degraded versus intact or perhaps restored. It's not trivial to account for or to attribute the losses in carbon to specific factors which might be on the market. Conversely, the gains that are made. So, yeah, you've got to unfortunately stick shovels in the ground. The bulk density issue is a really big one. You know, again, confounding factors, multiple depths, considering, you know, the heterogeneity. We talked about the different microsites, you know, whether or not -- you know, there's an old adage, the bias in rangeland ecology starts where you decide to park your truck.

>> Right.

>> In this game, it gets even worse when you have to stick a shovel or an auger that might just be like a couple inches in diameter into the ground. Are you going to sample the soils in a microsite that does not have any canopy cover or are you going to go directly underneath the shrub? You're going to get a massively different estimate of soil carbon based on your decision. The message from our paper is you've got to sample all those microsites and you have to have a cogent, smart plan for integrating across those different microsites. It's doable. It must be done. The inconvenient truth here is that it must be done and it is hard work. Harry, what do you think?

>> Yeah, I can add some points here. You know, firstly, we wanted a scientifically defensible approach to quantifying soil carbon losses that are associated with annual grass invasion. And I think from everything you've heard from Matt and Toby today, we achieved that for the locations that we looked at. I do like to remind people that this is phase one of the research. It's fairly limited in scale, very detailed in scale. We are expanding that work. And Matt and Toby have also been very successful at getting additional grants to build this work out. So we -- our expectation or hope is that at the end of the day, we'll have a modeling approach, have enough locations where we have detailed measurements so that we can make estimations across large regions as to what the carbon losses may be for conversion at a particular location. But I think the other important thing here in terms of carbon markets, the expense of doing a comprehensive soil sampling program is really high. So we're never going to do a project on an area and then put shovels in the ground to quantify the carbon changes that occur, mainly because of the longtime scales and the expense. So, you know, if we're ever going to do this on a large scale, we do need to be able to do estimates. And we want those estimates to start from a scientifically defensible approach to measuring soil carbon.

>> Yeah, that leads me to one of my questions is, if we're going to monetize carbon on rangelands in some version of a carbon market, should we be valuing stable carbon storage instead of just additionality?

>> I can --

>> Yup.

>> Yeah, I can just take a brief stab at that and say, I think yes. And I think -- I am no sociologist, but I've sat in some rooms with some sessions talking about carbon and people always want to know, "Well, if I've been managing my land appropriately for carbon for years, why is there no opportunity for me, you know, if I've already got a lot of carbon?" So I think we should value the carbon that's there. I think our study points to that very clearly. And I can't claim to be the person that has the market solution for that, but I think that's key. And then I also just wanted to make one kind of big picture point about -- that I think kind of encompasses not only the markets, but the last couple of topics, fire and carbon sequestration as well, which is that the -- seeing the sagebrush steppe as a sea of sagebrush that's homogenous is, you know, just not going to work for managing carbon because, you know, within very short distances, there's steep elevation gradients and there's some parts of the sagebrush very close to each other that might have very different carbon responses to a particular management action, be it fertilization, fire suppression, creative ways to graze it. Those gradients also exist from, you know, east to west. There's different climates. And -- so just to point out from the market perspective and from the valuation perspective and the management perspective that we need research that can, yes, be general enough to act on, but not so general that it misses some of these key differences that we know exist in how these ecosystems will respond to management.

>> And I'll make one more point in here. I mean, there is a sense of urgency. You know, we are losing this close to a million acres a year that are converting. We know that it has major impacts on many different aspects, you know, like forage quality and quantity on wildlife habitat, on biodiversity, on wildfire frequency. So carbon is one more very compelling reason to take action. So when it comes to quantifying and monetizing the carbon benefits, I think it's important to recognize that we don't have to be completely accurate. We just have to be partially accurate and improve the accuracy with time. But we can't wait until we have the perfect answers because -- I mean, we are just transitioning so much of the western rangeland on an annual basis to a stable degraded state.

>> Right. If we can be accurate as to the direction and magnitude of change that it leads to -- in terms of management, that's getting us somewhere. Were there other -- any other conclusions that may or may not have been in the paper about ways to mitigate carbon loss or to prevent it in the first place?

>> I guess one quick topic to bring up, because you brought up Paige Stanley's beautiful paper on grazing, is that -- just to point out that we intentionally did not cover grazing here. And there's some very interesting science that she and others are working on. But we did our best to, in that site selection process that we went into, to control for that. Grazing, obviously, there's a whole set of science out there and trying to come up with creative ways to affect carbon. And -- so I guess I just wanted to point out that we're simply trying to identify these exotic grass and wildfire effects. But grazing, you know, is regionally -- there's regionally diverse effects of grazing. And -- so I can look to other work to identify the effects of that. And that's still an ongoing science, too.

>> We spoke briefly about phase two of the research. Was there anything that we didn't cover that you wanted to mention about the next steps here?

>> Well, I'll [inaudible]. Carry on, Toby.

>> No, just the extent. So just to be brief.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. So this -- as Matt alluded to at one point, we -- phase one implied that it's our first stage of learning and the sagebrush steppe is diverse. And we have expanded across to actually your region, to Central Washington, Central Eastern Oregon, Western Colorado, around the whole sagebrush extent. And so what we hope to do is to start to be able to not only ask what the effects of these disturbances are, but to, with that range, start to actually identify, like do those effects depend on the climate, the soil type, some of these things you were saying about how you kind of walk around and at times the cheatgrass seems so opportunistic that its distribution can be random. Well, with this spread of sites across a wide geographic range, our hope is to start to really be able to identify --

>> Explain some of that.

>> Exactly. Where are these effects happening at greater or lesser magnitudes?

>> Harry, you had another thought on that?

>> I would say just the -- that, you know, when we started this collaboration, USGS was -- seemed to be a natural place to go because of the access to geographic systems, the access to experts, also access to government land to do the soil sampling. And -- I mean, from what you've heard today and the paper, this collaboration far exceeded our expectation going into it. So we also have great hope for the next phase and expanding this project not only through phase two directly related to our collaboration, but also to additional work that Matt and Toby have got funded on for other projects. And I think it's also going to launch a lot of investigations by other people as well outside of this collaboration. And so, you know, our real hope is that we'll move quite quickly to regional scale models for estimating carbon losses with the conversion to annual grass invasion.

>> Good. Well, one professional risk in research is that you might discover nothing noteworthy. And I'm happy that this was not one of those studies. This is, yeah, toward the end of what will come out as a two-part series. At this point, people will be listening to part two. But I do want to ask for those that have listened all the way through, can one of you sort of summarize what are the big things that people should remember in case their brains are a little bit wrapped around the axle at this point?

>> Carbon in soil is hard to measure, but it is feasible to do well. You just have to think about the different factors that are affecting it. And people should be leery of estimating ecosystem carbon simply from maps of vegetation. Number two, the most efficient and effective way that we can measure -- that we can manage our semi-arid rangelands for our carbon benefits is to protect undisturbed, uninvaded habitat from being burned and invaded or developed in other ways. The biggest bang for the buck lies in that strategy because restoration in these dry landscapes is hard and we're not always successful with it. And in terms of carbon accounting, there's a lot more uncertainty about what it takes -- about how carbon is gained back into a system compared to how it's lost.

>> I could add one small thought here, which is that carbon is not just carbon. Carbon is soil health and soil quality. So thinking about managing or -- managing to increase or conserve carbon is also managing to increase or conserve forage production, soil water holding capacity, plant community resilience, nutrient availability. So carbon is -- I see it as a -- it's a big umbrella factor. It's an integrating factor for many things that are key to maintaining resilient rangelands. And this research pointed out that we can also conserve -- by harnessing the main things that we're resisting in rangelands in many places, which is fire and invasions, we can benefit not only the carbon stocks for this big picture global atmospheric carbon issue, but also, we can conserve the resilience of these rangelands, which I think is key.

>> I would agree. Yeah. And some other work that we've done at WSU, we've called these no regrets strategies, meaning that they have a variety of benefits. Even if you're a rancher whose only interest is in profiting from the landscape, and I have not met that many ranchers for whom that is their only goal, but even if it was, there would be benefits to managing in ways that stabilize and maximize carbon storage. And I -- those are good stories to tell. I resist using canned questions to wrap things up, but I am interested in whether or not there are any resources available for people to learn more about this work that's not a journal article. I think it's open access, but not everyone's going to read a journal article. Is there anywhere else that people can learn a little bit more about what you guys are doing?

>> Yes. There has been quite a bit of different social media types of things that have followed this particular publication. They are links to the paper on the nature website. We also have a website that is very short and generalized that is posted on our US Geological Survey Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center website.

>> Great.

>> And Toby and Harry, am I missing other things? I know we've had a variety of webinars that we've delivered over the past several years as this project has picked up momentum.

>> Yeah, the Endview LinkedIn page had a posting on this kind of a very accessible way of getting the gist of the findings from this paper. We're also going to have an article on our website that would explain the results. And there was also a press release, by the way, and it was picked up by over 500 news organizations and reposted. So there has been a lot of publicity around it already.

>> Good.

>> I guess last but not least, I'll just say we are resources and respond -- you know, we respond to cold emails and I get excited when folks reach out. So if anybody out there is interested, we're happy to chat with them.

>> Yeah. Thank you for that. You guys aren't sitting in a white lab coat somewhere locked up in an ivory tower. Accessible to people.

>> Thankfully not.

>> No, we are blue collar, getting the crunches, and by the way, get our hands dirty.

>> Right. Not just cleaning on the shovel, but running the shovel.

>> That's right.

>> There you go.

>> I have -- go ahead.

>> Oh, I was going to say one of my favorite phrases I learned was, you never trust a soil scientist without dirt under their fingernails.

>> That's a good one. That's right. Yeah. I do have one final question. We probably don't have a lot of people that are potential donors to work, but you mentioned -- I'm curious how -- because I don't know, how could people support research on stuff like this on effective control? On effective -- research on control. Well, if they're landowners or land managers, they should -- I hope that they appreciate two things. Number one, that any action they take towards mitigating the problems is an experiment. And we, as scientists, who do science in support of informing management are available to either directly or perhaps advise them on turning their management actions into learning opportunities. That is super crucial to do. That's our only way forward, in my opinion, for solving this annual grass fire problem and improving the health of rangelands. So, yeah, that's number one. Number one is, if you are a landowner or a land manager, and what's discussed here today is of interest to you, and especially if you are doing or planning treatments or even have done them in the past, please reach out to us and let's turn your landscape into a learning opportunity. It doesn't necessarily need to cost you much or anything to do that.

>> That's a great answer. I like that. Everybody who's managing land is a researcher. Be observant, try stuff, and talk to people and ask questions.

>> Yeah. But number two is to follow NVU's lead. And that -- this actually started when the enterprise was first underneath Bayer Corporation, but they were genuinely interested in this societal problem and they decided to invest in it. And I think there's lots of opportunities for others in industry or endowments to make meaningful, highly impactful contributions to this problem. They can directly contact us. There's many different ways to get involved, both in providing leadership to us, and if they're interested, that leadership could involve monetary contributions. Our work -- you know, the Department of Interior provides my salary, a building and the facilities, but all of the work that we do is effectively project funded. It's tasked. And -- so the tasks have to follow dollars to pay for the salaries and things like that. So there's obviously that opportunity exists as well.

>> Great. That's a good answer. Well, you guys have been very generous with your time. And I want to thank you for doing clean research that's relevant to real people and for being willing to talk about it and for being willing to talk with real people who have further questions and would like to do some stuff on their own.

>> Appreciate the opportunity very much, Tip. Thank you.

>> Yeah, thanks so much. It's been a great conversation.

>> Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Thank you, Tip.

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