Collaborative Research: LTREB renewal: Stability and resilience in the face of multiple interacting press and pulse disturbances

This project supports long-term research in rangeland ecosystem to better understand the relationships between livestock, wildlife, and other stressors impacting ecosystem resilience. Researchers will study the impact of multiple factors on competition and coexistence of livestock with wildlife, and the stability and resilience in a savanna rangeland community in the face of drought, fire, and other environmental stressors. This research provides a unique and essential baseline for the conservation, management, and restoration of rangelands including those in the United States, which lost most of its large herbivores more than 10,000 years ago, but where efforts are underway to reintroduce species similar to those lost. This project will fosters the career development of a strong research team of early career researchers and graduate students and outreach to stakeholders. The use of molecular techniques and remote sensing technology to evaluate the impact of herbivory, drought, and fertilization will improve rangeland management practices from targeted approaches to the landscape scale. This proposal is to support years 31-35 of the Kenya Long-term Exclosure Experiment (KLEE), a controlled replicated experiment examining the separate and combined effects of livestock, wildlife, and fire on each other and on their shared savanna landscape. Although it is becoming increasingly clear that loss of native fauna (“defaunation”) can have far-reaching effects on ecosystems, experimental studies to evaluate these effects remain rare. KLEE uses semi-permeable barriers to create six replicated treatments comprised of different combinations of 1) cattle, 2) meso-herbivore wildlife, and 3) mega-herbivores (elephants and giraffes). This project provides a unique opportunity to understand how interactions between defaunation and multiple pulse and press disturbances affect ecosystem stability and function. After 30 years, the six herbivore treatments support distinct (but still diverging) plant communities, providing powerful opportunities to 1) analyze long-term data in the context of community and ecosystem resilience and stability, and 2) analyze new experimental layers and additional response variables that, along with our previous core long-term data, allow us to assess community resilience under multiple disturbance stressors, including herbivory (three guilds), drought, fire, fertilization, heavy grazing, and termites. The project will continue to add to and explore this rich data set. The decadal proposal also included an ambitious plan to implement experimental reversals of several KLEE treatments in the second five years to test dynamics related to the efficacy of rewilding, the reversibility of rangeland degradation, and the stability of alternative ecological states in general. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2534729 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Amelia Wolf | Institution: University of Texas at Austin, AUSTIN, TX | Award Amount: $129,613 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2534729 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2534729.html