Invasive and native plant responses to shrubland fuel reduction: comparing prescribed fire, mastication, and treatment season

Fuel reduction in the wildland-urban interface is a widely used international strategy for assisting human communities regarding wildfire threats, but very little research has examined whether certain fuel reduction methods and their seasonal timing promote normative invasion. To address this issue, we evaluated normative and native plant response to five of the most commonly-practiced shrubland fuel reduction methods in Mediterranean climates, including (a) fall prescribed fire, (b) winter prescribed fire, (c) spring prescribed fire, (d) fall mastication (slashing) and (e) spring mastication. Treatments were replicated four times in mature northern California chaparral and surveyed for three years after treatment; treatment type was randomly assigned. We found that the effects of treatment type (fire/mastication) were more apparent than the effects of treatment season (fall/winter/spring), but there were some differences among seasons of prescribed fire. Mastication treatments had the highest number of normative invasive species. Mastication treatments also had 34% higher normative annual grass abundance than the fire treatments. Winter and spring prescribed fire treatments were most resistant to normative invasion since these areas had the fewest normative species, lowest normative species abundances, and highest relative proportions of native plants. In shrublands where controlling normative annual grass is an important objective, managers should consider cool season prescribed fire as a viable fuel reduction treatment. In cases where prescribed fire is not feasible, mastication provides an alternative that can exacerbate nonnative grass production in the short term but may maintain native plant seedbanks over the long term if the site remains undisturbed for several decades. Results from this study could be applicable to other areas of Mediterranean shrublands. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.