The current cover of snow hides about 3,000 pounds of native plant seed that may revise how land managers think about forest fire repair.
“There's a lot of research done on fires, and how things are affected by fires, but most of it has been done in the Great Basin and Nevada,” said Morgan Valliant, conservation lands manager for the city of Missoula. “That's a lot different than Missoula, so
Valliant teamed up with the University of Montana's Marilyn Marler this November to spread native grasses and flowers in the 390 acres of Sentinel's west face that burned last July. They gathered almost 100 volunteers to distribute the seed.
“This is an unknown area of plant management,” Marler said. “We usually spend time in areas where lots of the native plant community is already there, or in extremely degraded areas try to contain weeds. There's not a lot of good methodology to know what to do.”
For example, land managers were at a loss to deal with the weed resurrections on Mount Jumbo after a July 2006 fire burned much of its grassland. The problem wasn't the fire so much as the strips of fire retardant that acted as fertilizer for weeds like tumble mustard and cheatgrass.
Marler and Valliant gathered about 100 volunteers in November to spread the new seed while their own staff sprayed herbicide on some weed-intensive areas. Valliant said some weed zones had covered the ground so thickly, other seeds couldn't reach the soil to germinate. The fire burned off that biomass, giving the new seeds a better start.
The native grasses were mixed with beebalm, yarrow, blanketflower, and penstemon wildflowers. It may take two summers for full results to become apparent, as many native plants establish big root complexes before flowering.
Marler said the effort will be monitored for two or three years to see how the reseeding takes effect. The results may be published in a scientific journal to help other communities use fire as part of their land management techniques.
Reporter Rob Chaney can be reached at 523-5382 or at rchaney@missoulian.com.
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