Strawberry Creek After the Fire: A Restoration Project Completed

First published in The Midden, the Great Basin National Park newsletter, Vol. 19, No. 1, Summer 2019. By Margaret Horner, biologist.

Park staff treating weeds. NPS photo by Julie Long.

The plan, and the fire

Great Basin National Park's Strawberry Creek Fuels Reduction and Sagebrush Steppe/Aspen Restoration project, funded by the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act (SNPLMA), began in 2015 on 206 acres of Strawberry Creek. Its goals:

• restore sagebrush steppe;
• improve the condition of aspen;
• reduce fuel;
• improve habitat for shrub-dependent wildlife.

In August 2016, the lightning-caused Strawberry Fire burned across the entire project area. It met the fuel-reduction and conifer-removal goals on its own, so the work turned to post-fire restoration: replanting, removing hazard trees, stabilizing slopes and streambanks, and finding and treating invasive plants.

Reseeding and replanting

• Aerial seeding: 307 acres were seeded from the air, twice, with a native mix — mountain big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata), basin wildrye (Leymus cinereus), bluebunch wheatgrass (Pseudoroegneria spicata), Indian ricegrass (Achnatherum hymenoides), redroot buckwheat (Eriogonum racemosum), Palmer's penstemon (Penstemon palmeri) and arrowleaf balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata).
• Trees: one thousand ponderosa pine seedlings were planted on eight acres; nuisance and hazard trees were removed on 13 acres.
• Slopes: saw crews contour-felled burned trees to hold slopes and protect streambanks.
• Weeds: invasive plant surveys covered 202 acres. New infestations of houndstongue (Cynoglossum officinale), a Nevada noxious weed, and African mustard (Malcolmia africana) were found and treated.

The work was done by park staff, Exotic Plant Management Teams and Nevada Conservation Corps crews.

How the land recovered

The same monitoring site in 2015 (before the fire), 2016 (after), 2017 and 2018. NPS photos.

• Surveys before and after the fire tracked native plants coming back and the seeded species taking hold — all but one were found on the plots.
• Plant cover dropped the year after the fire, but by 2018 had recovered, shifting to grasses and wildflowers.
• Single-leaf pinyon (Pinus monophylla) and Utah juniper (Juniperus osteosperma) were greatly thinned by the fire.
• Two years after the fire, plant diversity was greater, and average herbaceous cover on the plots was up 36%.

Strawberry Creek has reopened for day use — go and see the recovery for yourself.

More from this issue of The Midden: lichen diversity in Great Basin National Park · 2019 snow survey results.

Sources

Based on "SNPLMA-Funded Strawberry Creek Restoration Project Complete," by Margaret Horner, The Midden — Great Basin National Park, Vol. 19, No. 1, Summer 2019, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Several scientific names misspelled in the source (Artemesia, Achnetherum, Eriogomum, Malcomia) are given here in their standard form.