From 1999 through the summer of 2000, Nevada has experienced 5.8 million acres of rangeland fire. Elko, Eureka, Humboldt, Pershing, Lander, Lincoln, and Washoe counties have been most severely affected. This is eight times the average fire acreage from the previous two decades. In summer 2006, Elko County experienced one of its worst fire years with over 950,000 acres of federal state, and private lands burning, which is approximately the size of the state of Rhode Island.
With these rangeland fires, the economic impacts of the fires at the ranch and regional level need to be estimated. The ranch level linear programming model being incorporated with the regional Social Accounting Model is needed to achieve greatest understanding of economic costs. An integrated model would allow quick estimation of rangeland fire impacts and allow analyses of alternative ranch production practices. Developing procedures to easily collect rangeland fire destruction estimates, restoration procedures and costs, and costs of suppressing rangeland fires would facilitate future studies.
By developing integrated ranch and regional level models, measurement of impacts of rangeland fires can be easily compared with alternative rangeland fire mitigation practices that could provide superior economic and ecosystem performance. This would help elucidate rationale for considering managerial investments by ranchers and agencies in development of physical and personnel infrastructure to more carefully manage grazing.
Grazing soon after a fire is widely recognized as a potential problem by agency personnel who tend to view grazing as a major cause of the cheatgrass explosion that is fueling the fires. While some research has shown grazing of cheatgrass to be beneficial to native and seeded perennial vegetation, improper grazing has the opposite effect, weakening the perennial resistance to continued cheatgrass expansion and domination.
Proper grazing strategies would focus herbivory on cheatgrass when it is green and palatable and then minimize negative impacts to perennials as cheatgrass seeds out, becoming purple and then brown, and far less palatable than green perennials. This could be accomplished by a combination of changing the season and duration of grazing. While range readiness (late turnout and often with a months-long grazing season) was a useful improvement to early and season-long use for upland range management in the pre-cheatgrass and pre-riparian management era, it provides a free ride to cheatgrass during its most vulnerable time.
Range readiness also exacerbated the problem of concentrated summer use of riparian areas. Focusing riparian management on correcting utilization through reduction of livestock numbers has almost certainly exacerbated the problem of abundant cheatgrass fuels and large rangeland fires. Months-long grazing periods continues to deteriorate rangelands in too many areas. The more effective tool for reducing impact to upland perennials and riparian areas is shortening the duration of grazing during the growing season.
Resistance to shorter duration grazing periods evokes the increased costs in labor, management oversight, and infrastructure development. Understanding the costs of fire and no-grazing for a few years after fire, would support rational discussions of management opportunities to address cheatgrass and other rangeland management issues. These costs are born by ranchers and by agencies and must be understood at ranch and regional scales.