Agenda/Events

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Theme Sessions

Theme 1: Threats to the Mojave Ecosystem: Past, Present, and Future

The overriding threat to the Mojave Desert is people, given the rapid growth of the human population. With the expansion of large cities and nearby communities, an increase in local effects such as recreational pressures, agriculture, road and trail proliferation, and collection of plants and wildlife. At the regional level there are increases in activities such as resource extraction, military training and the expansion of transportation and utility corridors. Global effects include dust and pollutant transport leading to reduced air quality, increased emissions of greenhouse gases and elevated air temperature, and transport of invasive flora and fauna that displace native species. This session will highlight threats to the Mojave Desert that cross multiple spatial and temporal scales, highlighting their synergistic, interactive, and cumulative effects.

Theme 2. Ecosystem Function: Linking Attributes to Processes

Managing desert ecosystems demands a broad understanding of the organisms, the environment that supports them, and the complex processes that occur over time and space. One of the most difficult tasks facing resource managers is balancing the need to study basic ecosystem function with limited budgets. Managers lack information on what ecosystem attributes should be measured and how they might be related to ecosystem-level processes and function. Determining what attributes accurately reflect the pulse of the desert ecosystem is a daunting task, particularly when faced with a diverse landscape with elements ranging from riparian to hyper-arid. What information is most important to managers? The purpose of this session is to apply areas of basic research that are of greatest importance for land management decisions. For example, what should be monitored to best assess how the desert landscape is responding to climate and other human-induced stressors?

Theme 3. Mojave Desert Rehabilitation: Natural Recovery Versus Active Restoration

Abandonment of desert landscapes following intensive use leaves a highly visible disturbed environment with elevated dust production, increased water erosion, and diminished environmental quality for plants and animals. Faced with the question about how to rehabilitate disturbed landscapes, managers must choose among active restoration, natural recovery, or some combination of both. Active-restoration techniques have evolved considerably in the last 10 years, focusing on re-creating habitat for plants and animals. Topsoil banking prior to disturbance, ripping of compacted soils, mulching of slopes, dispersal of seeds, and planting of seedlings are some of the methods that have changed an endeavor once thought to be hopeless into a potential – albeit costly – rehabilitation solution. Natural recovery, once thought to require enormous amounts of time, has recently been shown to occur in time periods of decades to centuries, although complete restoration of species composition may still require millennia. Hybrid combinations, where highly visible disturbance zones are actively restored to stop future impacts and the remaining areas are left to recover naturally, are an evolving area of landscape restoration. In this theme, we will explore the three approaches with an emphasis on the scientific viability and economic cost of each, and we will discuss the various disturbance scenarios that might require specific treatments.

Theme 4. Scales and Sustainability

Natural features, events, and processes span the continuum of space and time, but as humans our observations are biased toward the scales of our senses and lifetimes. This session delves into interrelationships between temporal-spatial scales of resource management practices and temporal-spatial scales of natural processes. Landscape-scale processes are often observed on garden-sized plots over a few years to a few decades at most, but are driven by climate changes regionally to globally over decadal to millennial time scales. Can plot-level data acquired within short timeframes be extrapolated to reflect what is occurring over longer time periods on a landscape scale? Can land management plans based on plot-scale observations adequately assess the various likelihoods of alternative futures? Our ability to accurately reflect landscape processes by scaling up from plot data will largely determine the success of resource management plans and practices. Conversely, separating the effects of long-term versus short-term processes and plot-level experimental effects must address analogous downscaling problems. Ultimately, understanding the relationships between spatial and temporal scales with ecosystem processes, and accounting for scale-dependence in our monitoring efforts, are prerequisites to managing for sustainability.