Viewpoint: An Alternative Management Paradigm for Plant Communities Affected by Invasive Annual Grass in the Intermountain West

Over 400,000 km2 of the Intermountain West is colonized by cheatgrass and other annual grasses. Planning and management actions designed to foster perennial grass health throughout the region have never addressed how annual grasses would respond. For decades, the most significant landscape-level management approach toward invasive annual grasses has been to complain. We now know how to begin the process of taking the Intermountain West back from the domination of invasive annual grasses: through the management of standing dead litter. Sustaining perennial bunchgrasses at landscape scales will require an integrated ecological approach to fuels management.