Progress 07/01/23 to 06/30/24

Outputs
Target Audience:During this reporting period (7/1/23 - 6/30/24), target audiences included (1) the scientific community, (2) local farmers and private landowners, (3) the general public, and (4) local and regional land managers (e.g., restoration practitioners) and other stakeholders. Scientific community: I presented a poster on the pasture restoration experiment at the Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon in August 2023. This meeting included thousands of academics in the field of ecology and my poster was of interest to members of the scientific community who engage with private landowners in the agricultural sector for ecological restoration and research. I also published a manuscript on the spatiotemporal analysis of the landscape drivers of increasing annual plant dominance in regional grasslands in the journal Landscape Ecology. This manuscript was well-received by reviewers, one of which noted that this paper addresses a timely and important topic of landscape susceptibility commonly overlooked by invasion studies. Local farmers and private landowners: I continued implementing a native prairie restoration project with farmers at My Brothers' Farm in Creswell, Oregon. I met and went on site visits with several other private landowners across the Willamette Valley in 2023 and 2024 to discuss how restoration practices might be adopted on their lands to support conservation goals. General public: I wrote a blog post for the Institute for Applied Ecology's website featuring the pasture restoration project occurring at My Brothers' Farm. The blog was written for a general audience and was sent out during our October 2023 e-newsletter, which is received by hundreds of IAE followers and supporters across the Willamette Valley and beyond. Local and regional land managers and other stakeholders: Prairie-oak ecosystems are a priority for restoration efforts in the western Pacific Northwest, but most of the historical prairie-oak habitat is now being used for agriculture. To expand the scope of prairie-oak restoration into the future, partnerships between the conservation community and agricultural professionals will be key. Over the past year, I have continued networking with and sharing ideas about this and other agroecological restoration projects with restoration practitioners and regional land managers, including local watershed councils and soil and water conservation districts. A key example of this was when I gave an oral presentation on the pasture restoration project at My Brothers' Farm at the Connect+ Conference in Sunriver, Oregon in April 2024. This conference featured hundreds of land managers and conservation practitioners across Oregon working at the nexus between sustainable agriculture and native habitat conservation. Changes/Problems:In February 2024, we requested a second no-cost extension of funds to continue the project for an additional year to June 30, 2025. The reason for this request was to allow more time to accomplish the remaining project objectives. In particular, there was an extenuating circumstance in which our native seeding experiment was setback by several months due to a delayed grant transfer process. In 2022, we transferred this award from a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oregon (award #2021-67034-35136) to a standard grant at the Institute for Applied Ecology (#2021-67034-38825). This process took several months and occurred during a critical period in fall 2022, when we intended to seed a paddock with cover crops as part of the pasture restoration experiment. Since we missed that opportunity, we seeded the cover crops in fall 2023 instead. Although we now have the cover crops and ongoing treatments in place, we still need to complete the objective of seeding the pasture and native seed mix, which we will do in fall 2024. This request was approved by the USDA NIFA Awards Management Division in March 2024. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?As during the previous year, I spent substantial time networking, collaborating, and building relationships with farmers, ranchers, academics, and conservation stakeholders in the Willamette Valley through this reporting period. I presented at two conferences to share results of this project and increase the publicity of agroecological restoration projects across the valley. These opportunities have opened lines of communication between IAE and the Upper Willamette Soil and Water Conservation District, who is interested in potentially funding a continuation/expansion of this project at My Brothers' Farm in the future. IAE's Habitat Restoration Technicians have participated in this project by collecting soil samples and implementing the soil amendment treatments, which has provided them with opportunities to engage with the farmers and expand their toolkit of land management techniques and practices. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest? Scientific community: I disseminated results of the remote-sensing dataset by producing a scientific publication in the open-access journal Landscape Ecology. I also disseminated results of the pasture restoration experiment by presenting at the Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting in August 2023. Local farmers: I am disseminating results of the restoration project at My Brothers' Farm by regularly meeting with and discussing the project with the farmers and by sharing an updated annual report with methods, results, and conclusions from the study. General public: I wrote a blog post for the Institute for Applied Ecology's website featuring the pasture restoration project occurring at My Brothers' Farm. The blog was written for a general audience and was sent out during our October 2023 e-newsletter, which is received by hundreds of IAE followers and supporters across the Willamette Valley and beyond. Local/regional land managers and other stakeholders: In addition to the scientific community, local/regional land managers and other stakeholders were in attendance for my talk on the pasture restoration experiment at the CONNECT+ Conference in April 2024. As part of my role as a restoration ecologist, I also regularly meet with practitioners throughout the region on other projects and have discussed this agroecological restoration project. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?The major priority for the final reporting period (July 1, 2024 - June 30, 2025) will be to finish restoration treatments and seed the six-acre experimental pasture with a native prairie seed mix in fall 2024. Ultimately, the goal is to establish a native prairie community within a sustainable perennial pasture for the long term. Our restoration plan is to allow the cover crops to continue suppressing the false dandelion in summer 2024 before disking the field to end the growing season, liming the field to increase soil pH, drill-seeding the field with a native perennial seed mix in fall 2024, and continuing soil amendment treatments through spring 2025. I have a plant community monitoring schema designed to examine the responses to management treatments for plant cover, soil health variables, and native seedling establishment which will continue into spring 2025. Using the data sets I have generated from this project between 2022 - 2025, I plan to produce a manuscript suitable for a publication in a regional journal such as Northwest Science. Additionally, I also plan to identify and pursue new funding opportunities to continue this agroecological restoration work at My Brothers' Farm and other sites across the Willamette Valley into the future. Native prairie and pasture restoration are dynamic processes requiring ongoing management to sustain long term, so additional funding will need to be secured to continue this work beyond summer 2025 (when this award ends). Additionally, the scope of this project has expanded to a total of six acres at My Brothers' Farm, but there are more than 100 additional acres across the farm where we could continue expanding this type of work. Furthermore, other local farmers and ranchers have expressed interest in having similar native prairie / pasture restoration work occurring on their properties. Therefore, I am planning to pursue funding opportunities such as through the Upper Willamette Soil and Water Conservation District to do more agroecological habitat restoration on working lands across the region.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? IMPACT STATEMENT: This project is (1) contributing to an increase in scientific knowledge about the threats and consequences of shifting plant communities in Pacific Northwest grasslands due to climate change and species invasions, and (2) developing strategies for regional land managers (e.g., farmers and restoration practitioners) to consider when managing annual dominated grasslands. Over the past 35 years, grasslands in the Willamette Valley, Oregon have exhibited a trend toward increasing annual plant cover. In general, steep, south-facing slopes and areas with shallow soils are most susceptible to invasion, meaning that major vegetation disturbances should be avoided in these areas if negative impacts to biodiversity, forage production, carbon storage, and pollinator habitat are to be minimized. When managing annual grass dominated pastures, rotational grazing can be used as a tool in conjunction with other practices (e.g., disking and drill seeding) to establish and maintain sustainable perennial forage while also reintroducing a diversity of native prairie species. Goal 1: I will continue astudy using a 35-year remote-sensing dataset to identify the landscape factors driving an increase in annual plant dominance in grasslands of the Willamette Valley, Oregon. This goal was achieved and completed during this reporting period.In August 2023, my spatiotemporal analysis manuscript on the annualization of Willamette Valley grasslands was published in the journal Landscape Ecology. I found that hot and dry steep, south-facing slopes with shallow soils are the most sensitive areas on the landscape to rising annual cover, and this sensitivity has been increasing through time since 1986. These areas are serving as the invasion front for nonnative annual grasses and pose a risk to the continued spread of invasive species with climate change. This information is critical for land managers on the ground because it makes it clear that these areas of the landscape are particularly vulnerable to rising invasive annual cover. Disturbing the plant communities in these areas may pose a high risk for allowing more invasive annuals to spread. I am utilizing knowledge generated from this study to inform my own restoration practices at sites I manage for other projects. For example, I am reconsidering some disturbance practices at sites that I know contain invasive annual grass species and have certain high-risk factors such as steep south-facing slopes and/or shallow soils. Goal 2: I will continue a restoration experiment developed with a local rancher, based on their interests and needs, to test whether grazing differentially affects perennial- versus annual-dominated grass pastures and explore whether native prairie restoration can be successful in conjunction with grazing in these two pasture communities. This project examines whether native forb species can be restored to the pastures to improve the balance of ecosystem services. I've continued the native prairie restoration experiment at My Brothers' Farm through 2023 and 2024, adapting the objectives and restoration plan in response to our findings and communications with the farm. I had spring 2023 soil samples analyzed at Oregon State University, which revealed relatively poor soil health conditions across the farm, particularly in paddocks that have been in conventional annual ryegrass production for decades. Soil compaction is high and pH is exceptionally low. In summer 2023, the farmers disked the six-acre restoration paddock twice to reduce false dandelion and annual ryegrass. In October, I seeded a cover crop mix of five species designed to suppress false dandelion and annual ryegrass through winter 2024 and begin alleviating poor soil health conditions. In December 2023 and March 2024, we amended the soil within a quarter of the paddock with a soil conditioner and microbial inoculum to experimentally test whether soil amendment treatments would improve cover crop growth and future native seeding success. In April 2024, I collected plant cover data along transects within the soil-amended area, non-amended area, and adjacent areas not seeded with cover crops to monitor cover crop abundance and richness, soil health variables, and annual ryegrass and false dandelion abundance. Following data collection, we terminated the cover crops through prescribed grazing in May 2024 but left the remaining biomass through summer 2024 to continue suppressing the false dandelion and annual ryegrass. In June 2024, I collected vegetation monitoring data in the native prairie experimental plots first established in 2021. These data suggest thatthe native perennial species are generally continuing to establish within the pastures and have begun flowering in greater abundance than in earlier years of the project.

Publications

• Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2023 Citation: Reed, P.B., Hallett, L.M. Spatiotemporal patterns of rising annual plant abundance in grasslands of the Willamette Valley, Oregon (USA). Landsc Ecol 38, 28852898 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-023-01754-3
• Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Other Year Published: 2023 Citation: Reed, P.B. and Hallett, L.M. Agroecological restoration for livestock production and native prairies in the Willamette Valley, Oregon. August 2023. Poster presentation at the Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting. Portland, OR.
• Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Other Year Published: 2024 Citation: Reed, P.B. and Hallett, L.M. Agroecological restoration for livestock and native prairies in the Willamette Valley. April 2024. Oral presentation at the Connect+ Conference. Sunriver, OR.

Progress 07/01/22 to 06/30/23

Outputs
Target Audience:During this reporting period (7/1/22 - 6/30/23), target audiences included (1) the scientific community, (2) local farmers, and (3) local and regional land managers (e.g., restoration practitioners) and other stakeholders. Scientific community: I gave a virtual presentation for the Society of Ecological Restoration's Northwest Chapter annual meeting in September 2022 and an oral presentation at the Cascadia Prairie-Oak Partnership Conference in November 2022. Both meetings included academic ecologists from across Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and the rest of the Pacific Northwest region. For the first meeting, I presented the farm restoration portion of this project, while at the second conference I presented on a spatiotemporal analysis of the landscape drivers of increasing annual dominance in regional grasslands. I also revised a manuscript on that spatiotemporal analysis and have submitted it for peer review. This manuscript will be of interest to the scientific community as it combines a remote sensing dataset of vegetation cover with soil and topographic data to understand where annual species have been increasing most rapidly over a 35-year period. Local farmers: I developed and am implementing a native prairie restoration project with farmers at My Brothers' Farm in Creswell, Oregon. I facilitated a site visit with scientists from the USDA-NRCS office in Corvallis, Oregon to make connections, facilitate thought-sharing, and develop the restoration project collaboratively. Local and regional land managers and other stakeholders: Prairie-oak ecosystems are a priority for restoration efforts in the western Pacific Northwest, but most of the historical prairie-oak habitat is now being used for agriculture. To expand the scope of prairie-oak restoration into the future, partnerships between the conservation community and agricultural professionals will be key. Over the past year, I have been networking with and sharing ideas about this and other agroecological restoration projects with restoration practitioners and regional land managers, such as at the two previously mentioned conferences. I also hosted a site visit at My Brothers' Farm with scientists from the USDA-NRCS office in Corvallis, Oregon to make connections, facilitate thought-sharing, and develop the restoration project collaboratively. Changes/Problems:In July 2022, I transitioned from my position as a postdoc at the University of Oregon to a restoration ecologist at the Institute for Applied Ecology. Prior to that transition, I started the process of transferring this grant to my new institution in May 2022. However, that transfer process was delayed substantially because of errors in the financial reporting from the University of Oregon that needed to be corrected. Thus, the Institute for Applied Ecology did not receive the transfer award until late November 2022. At that point, it was too late to implement the planned second year seeding activities at My Brothers' Farm in fall 2022. In January 2023, we requested a no-cost extension of funds for an additional year to June 30, 2024. This gives us the opportunity to reseed the farm experiment in fall 2023 since this was missed in 2022. It has also given us the opportunity to develop a more thorough restoration plan in collaboration with the farmer, which we will now collect data for through spring 2024. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?The site visit in February 2023 between USDA-NRCS scientists and the farmers at My Brothers' Farm helped facilitate knowledge sharing and training. The USDA staff provided their thoughts and recommendations on tools and practices for how to quickly convert a field of annual ryegrass and false dandelion into a desired pasture condition while staying within organic, no-till parameters. The farmers were receptive to their ideas and will be putting some of their recommendations into practice. As an ecologist with a non-profit conservation organization, facilitating this meeting helped advance my own professional development by allowing me to learn more of the industry vocabulary and common agricultural tools and practices for managing livestock pastures. Our restoration technician also attended the meeting and benefited in the same manner. Additionally, I spent substantial time networking, collaborating, and building relationships with farmers, ranchers, and conservation stakeholders in the Willamette Valley through this reporting period. I presented at two regional conferences in 2022 to share results of this project and increase the publicity of agroecological restoration projects across the valley. I continue to serve on the lands committee for the McKenzie River Trust, where I provide expertise and guidance in reviewing and prioritizing new land conservation opportunities. With IAE, I've also participated in several professional development opportunities, such as a Wilderness First Aid and CPR certification course in April 2023. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest? Scientific community: I am disseminating results of the remote-sensing dataset by producing a scientific manuscript that is currently under peer review. The manuscript has been posted online as a preprint, so it is currently available for all to read. I have also disseminated results of both the remote-sensing dataset and the farm restoration experiment by presenting at the SER NW annual meeting and Cascadia Prairie-Oak Partnership Conferences in fall 2022. Local farmers: I am disseminating results of the restoration experiment at My Brothers' Farm by regularly meeting with and discussing the project with the farmers and by sharing an updated annual report with methods, results, and conclusions from the study. Local/regional land managers and other stakeholders: In addition to the scientific community, local/regional land managers and other stakeholders were in attendance for my talks during the SER NW annual meeting and Cascadia Prairie-Oak Partnership Conference in fall 2022. As part of my role as a restoration ecologist, I also regularly meet with practitioners throughout the region on other projects and have discussed this agroecological restoration project. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?The major priority for the next reporting period (July 1, 2023 - June 30, 2024) will be to continue the restoration experiment at My Brothers' Farm and get the project to a point where we may be able to successfully establish a native prairie community within a sustainable perennial pasture for the long term. I have a restoration plan in place with the farmer, who will implement the disking, ripping, and cover cropping treatments throughout the following year. I have a plant community monitoring schema designed to examine the responses to management treatments for plant cover, soil health variables, and native seedling establishment. I will collect plant cover data and resample soils in spring 2024 and will produce a manuscript of this project for publication in a suitable journal, such as Northwest Science. I will be presenting a poster on the pasture restoration experiment at the Ecological Society of America's Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon in August 2023. This will be an opportunity to disseminate my results to a much broader scientific community. I am also going to write a blog post for the October 2023 newsletter for the Institute for Applied Ecology, which will be shared through My Brothers' Farm's website and social media channels. This will help disseminate our collaborative project and results to the general public. For the remote sensing dataset manuscript, I plan to make any potential revisions suggested by the current reviewers and see the product through to publication.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? IMPACT STATEMENT: This project is (1) contributing to an increase in scientific knowledge about the threats and consequences of shifting plant communities in Pacific Northwest grasslands due to climate change and species invasions, and (2) developing strategies for regional land managers (e.g., farmers and restoration practitioners) to consider when managing annual dominated grasslands. Over the past 35 years, grasslands in the Willamette Valley, Oregon have exhibited a trend toward increasing annual plant cover. In general, steep, south-facing slopes and areas with shallow soils are most susceptible to invasion, meaning that major vegetation disturbances should be avoided in these areas if negative impacts to biodiversity, forage production, carbon storage, and pollinator habitat are to be minimized. When managing annual grass dominated pastures, rotational grazing can be used as a tool in conjunction with other practices (e.g., disking and drill seeding) to establish and maintain sustainable perennial forage while also reintroducing a diversity of native prairie species. Goal 1: I will continue astudy using a 35-year remote-sensing dataset to identify the landscape factors driving an increase in annual plant dominance in grasslands of the Willamette Valley, Oregon. In summer 2022, I finalized a spatiotemporal analysis on the annualization of Willamette Valley grasslands using a 35-year remote-sensing dataset. I combined a dataset of plant functional group cover estimates with USDA soils data and topographic variables derived from digital elevation models to explore the landscape drivers of increasing annual dominance. I gathered, processed, and analyzed these data through 2022 and submitted a manuscript for peer review to a journal in July 2022. I received feedback from the original journal editor and revised the manuscript accordingly, and subsequently submitted it to a new journal in May 2023, where it is currently under peer review. I found that hot and dry, steep, south-facing slopes with shallow soils are the most sensitive areas on the landscape to rising annual cover, and this sensitivity has been increasing through time since 1986. These areas are serving as the invasion front for nonnative annual grasses and pose a risk to the continued spread of invasive species with climate change. This information will help inform land managers on the ground because it makes it clear that these areas of the landscape are particularly vulnerable to rising annual cover. Disturbing the plant communities in these areas may pose a high risk for allowing more invasive annuals to spread. I presented this research at the Cascadia Prairie-Oak Partnership Conference in Vancouver, Washington in November 2022. I received positive feedback from fellow restoration practitioners who noted that they are observing these same patterns on the ground. I am utilizing knowledge from this analysis to inform my own restoration practices at sites I manage for other projects. For example, I am reconsidering certain disturbance practices (e.g., prescribed fire) at sites that I know contain invasive annual grass species and have certain high-risk factors such as steep south-facing slopes and/or shallow soils. Goal 2: I will continue a restoration experiment developed with a local rancher, based on their interests and needs, to test whether grazing differentially affects perennial- versus annual-dominated grass pastures and explore whether native prairie restoration can be successful in conjunction with grazing in these two pasture communities. This project examines whether native forb species can be restored to the pastures to improve the balance of ecosystem services. I've continued the native prairie restoration experiment at My Brothers' Farm through 2022 and 2023. In February 2023, I facilitated a site visit between the farmers and USDA-NRCS scientists from the Corvallis, Oregon office to discuss pasture health, management practices, and develop a plan for accelerating and improving the pasture restoration process. As a result of this meeting, we developed a restoration plan that is being implemented now through 2024. In one six-acre paddock that is dominated by annual ryegrass and false dandelion, the farmers have committed to a plan of repeated disking treatments to reduce the ryegrass and false dandelion, followed by ripping to reduce soil compaction, drill-seeding a cover crop mix through fall and winter 2023, and finally reseeding with a perennial forage and native prairie diversity mix in 2024. I am incorporating experimentation into this restoration plan by having the farmers chisel rip half of the paddock and establishing transects to monitor whether this management action affects cover crop cover, soil health variables, annual ryegrass and false dandelion cover, and native seedling establishment in 2024. In March 2023, I picked up with monthly vegetation monitoring in the plots I established in 2022. I found that the native prairie species that established the previous year had all persisted to 2023, and that there continues to be a trend of greater native richness and cover in the grazed plots relative to the ungrazed plots. Two of the ten seeded native species are doing particularly well, and the perennial species are now more established and flowering in spring 2023, as they are no longer first year seedlings. In April 2023, I collected soil samples from differing aged pastures (with varying ratios of annual vs. perennial grass dominance) across the farm and sent the samples to Oregon State University for a complete soil health assessment. I presented this research at the Society for Ecological Restoration's Northwest Chapter annual meeting in September 2022 and will present a poster on the project at the Ecological Society of America's annual meeting in August 2023.

Publications

• Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Other Year Published: 2022 Citation: Reed, P.B. and Hallett, L.M. Bison grazing as a tool for native prairie restoration in the southern Willamette Valley, Oregon. September 2022. Virtual presentation at the Society for Ecological Restoration Northwest Chapter annual meeting.
• Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Other Year Published: 2022 Citation: Reed, P.B. and Hallett, L.M. Spatiotemporal patterns of rising annual plant abundance in Willamette Valley grasslands. November 2022. Presentation at the Cascadia Prairie-Oak Partnership Conference. Vancouver, WA.
• Type: Journal Articles Status: Under Review Year Published: 2023 Citation: Reed, P.B., and Hallett, L.M. Spatiotemporal patterns of rising annual plant abundance in grasslands of the western Pacific Northwest, USA. In review at Landscape Ecology.