> Buffel grass blamed for jump in US desert wildfires
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Posted May 2009
An introduced pasture grass planted as livestock feed in arid and semi-arid Australia is one of several weedy invaders being blamed for an increase in unnatural wildfires across American deserts and national parks.
Speaking during an investigation into the impacts of climate change on America’s national parks Thomas Swetnam, a professor of dendrochronology from the University of Arizona, warned that buffel grass is one of several invasive grass species fuelling increasingly hot desert wildfires that are wiping out cactus and other native species in the US.
“The spreading clumps of buffel grass are forming continuous patches hundreds of acres in size in some places, and they are carrying extraordinarily hot, running fires through the Sonoran Desert,” Swetnam said during hearings last month at the Joshua Tree National Park in California.
“These fires kill most of the cactus and other native species because they are not adapted to such fires, which have never occurred with this severity or extent in these ecosystems before. Buffel grass, in contrast, is highly adapted to fire and it resprouts prolifically.”
Swetnam said the problem of widespread invasive species promoting unnatural wildfires is increasingly common in American deserts and national parks.
“In the summer of 2005, invasive grasses fuelled desert wildfires that approached a quarter of a million acres in central Arizona and three quarters of a million acres in southern Nevada.”
He said the desert grass invasions and altered fire regimes were threatening lives and leading to significant economic losses through decreased property value, lost tourism revenue, escalating weed control and fire suppression budgets as well as compromising conservation initiatives.
Buffel grass was originally introduced to the Sonoran Desert, one of the largest and hottest deserts in North America, as forage for livestock.
In Australia it is widespread across central and northern parts of the country, and has invaded a range of native plant communities. It has been identified as a major threat to biodiversity in regional natural resource management.
More information
You can download the individual testimonies made to the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Natural Resources from the committee website.
Weed management guide for buffel grass, CRC Weed management – PDF 472kb
I worked on Buffel Grass in Central Australia and it was obvious that the fire threat in and around Alice Springs was increased considerably by the invasion of Buffel Grass across the urban fringe, threatening property and life. Across the landscape Buffel Grass is at such levels of density that it has set up a new fire regime that threatens many important biological communities.