Resist, Accept and Direct: Restoring Old Grazing Land at Capitol Reef

Monitoring vegetation at Capitol Reef tracks shifts in plant species from climate change and recovery after grazing. NPS photo

At Capitol Reef National Park in southern Utah, staff are using the resist–accept–direct (RAD) framework on land shaped by cattle grazing: allotments in the Upper South Desert and an active allotment in the park's south.

The problem

Two allotments were designated in the Upper South Desert when the park was established in 1971. Livestock grazing, together with climate change, has taken a toll on its grass and shrublands: poorer soil, lost species and more invasive plants. Now drought and heat stress driven by climate change are making the shift from old allotments back to healthy ecosystems harder. The park's approach combines restoring damage from past land use with planning ahead for climate change.

Three choices

As climate change combines with other pressures — changing land use, more visitors, pollution, nonnative species — ecosystems and park infrastructure are changing beyond their historical range, and those changes are increasingly hard to hold back. The RAD framework helps managers make informed, purposeful choices. It is simple, flexible, works alongside other adaptation approaches, and applies to a wide range of decisions.

Where the park can accept

Most of the retired allotment land in the Upper South Desert is healthy: native plants are dense and diverse, nonnative plants are largely absent, and the ground is covered in biological soil crust, which supplies nutrients and water to plants and resists erosion. There, managers can comfortably accept natural change while they keep monitoring the ecosystem.

Accepting the worst, for now

Managers are also choosing to accept change where the land is in the very worst shape: parts of the Upper South Desert entirely overrun by invasive species, and bare ground with no cost-effective way to restore it. It is an informed decision to wait until recovery has a better chance. In the future, the park may start clearing the active allotment in its south with herbicides to control invasive cheatgrass — moving there from accepting change to resisting it.

Resisting the loss of rare plants

Where federally listed imperiled species survive — the Last Chance Townsendia daisy and Wright's fishhook cactus — the park resists change, meaning their disappearance. Both are found only in south-central Utah, and could vanish from the wild as climate change worsens heat stress and drought. The cacti are small and spread across the land slowly, and poor conditions leave them too few seeds for restoration. Lacking the science, resources or knowledge to do more for them, the park keeps weeds at bay and hopes longer-term solutions will come.

Directing new growth

Parts of the Upper South Desert are turning, because of past damage, into land where native plants grow alongside nonnatives, with wide stretches of bare, erodible soil between. Stewards see promise in the patches of plants and young soil crust. Rather than spend time and money removing nonnative species, they aim simply to cover more ground with plants to limit erosion — directing change with the help of the USGS RestoreNet network. Of the experimental designs RestoreNet suggests, digging small pits worked: the pits hold moisture and soil and let seeds, native and nonnative, settle and sprout. Steering the growth of all vegetation here gives better conditions than simply letting the land change on its own.

Every part of the framework

With new cheatgrass management, using local disturbances to restore native plants, and help from Invasive Plant Management Teams and youth crews, Capitol Reef is using all of RAD to steer the park through a fast-changing landscape. Morgan Wehtje of Capitol Reef and Jim Roche of the U.S. Forest Service provided information for the original article.

Sources

Based on Kaylin Thomas, "Rangeland restoration and the RAD framework at Capitol Reef National Park," NPS Climate Change Response Program (2024), National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.