Land managers and private landowners are often faced with decisions that require information about long-term effects of various land management practices on grassland ecosystem services, such as plant biodiversity, forage production, wildlife habitat, and carbon sequestration. It is generally understood that intensive land management practices can have immediate strong effects on ecosystem attributes, such as vegetation height and shrub abundance. Yet, it is also important to understand the longer-term impact of these practices. In western Colorado grasslands, we assessed the long-term impacts of intensive land management practices- prescribed burning, mechanical vegetation removal, and seeding (each n=3) – on various plant and soil attributes to address the following questions: 1) How do these land management practices affect long-term ecosystem service provision (e.g., carbon sequestration, wildlife habitat, and plant cover)? 2) When combined, what are the long-term effects on plant biodiversity of the land?
Results/Conclusions
Shrub and tree height were found to be shortest within the prescribed burn sites while all treatments resulted in lower grass height compared with control sites. We found no relationship between treatments and canopy cover, bare ground, litter, or total soil nitrogen. Prescribed burning resulted in the greatest amount of total soil carbon. These findings demonstrate that land management practices can have long lasting effects on ecosystem services, but this varies based on the ecosystem service and the type of land management practice. We posit that many ecosystem services, such as forage production, may return to pre-management states in the absence of repeated management efforts, while others may be impacted for much longer times scales. We also suggest that close monitoring during and after the implementation of land management practices is necessary to maximize ecosystem services of working lands.