 Our next speaker is going to be Dr. David Toledo. Dr. Toledo is a rangeland specialist with the USDA ARS Center in Mandan. His research focuses on ecosystem health evaluation, the human dimensions of rangeland management, and finding ways of optimizing landman management practices under changing climate and land use scenarios. David's work has resulted in improvements in rangeland sampling techniques used in the NRI data set in the integration of pasture land and rangeland monitoring and assessment methods, and in determining the social ecological factors affecting the use of prescribed fire in Texas and North Dakota. David also has done a lot of work, not only in U.S. but also in Mexico, Peru, Chile, Columbia, and Kazakhstan. Dr. Toledo's title today is Landowner Perceptions of an Invasive Grass in the Northern Plains of the U.S. Let's welcome David. Thank you, and thank you very much to the organizers for putting together such a great program and for accepting my talk Friday. So thank you very much for this last-minute inclusion. So I'm going to talk about research that Kayandra Rajala did as part of her master's thesis. She was at Virginia Tech under Mike Serice, and together we kind of designed this experiment because we wanted to learn more about what was happening with Kentucky Bluegrass and landowner perceptions of Kentucky Bluegrass and whether they were interested in managing for it or not. John earlier mentioned that I was going to talk about fire. This talk is not going to be about fire. Sorry, John. But I look up to John. I want to keep him happy. So I'll give you a quick recap. So Kayla Bendel, who was a master's student here at NDSU, she was working with Tori Hovick. She did work on perceptions of fire here in North Dakota. We put together a survey. And one of the interesting things she found was that as opposed to what we originally thought, not everyone in North Dakota is opposed to fire. So there is some willingness to burn. But there's some major barriers to getting those burns done. And those burns had to do with a lack of knowledge, access to resources, and those resources mainly included labor during burning days and equipment. And we propose that the creation of prescribed burn associations would be a really good step forward towards reducing those barriers. Summary of that talk. So now onto this one. So as we've heard, there's been plenty of research that shows Kentucky Bluegrass has increased and national resource inventory data show that it's invaded more than 50% of the acre sample in both of the Dakotas. We've heard, we've actually seen this graph too, how that invasion kind of, like we start getting those homogenized ecosystems, we start losing a lot of those ecosystem services that these grasslands provide. And as Kentucky Bluegrass starts invading, the perception is not that negative. We see that, that we still have lots of forage for animals, they're still habitat. Everything is okay, those lower levels of invasion. This is a C3 species, as I think we all know. But then as land gets more invaded with Kentucky Bluegrass and you get hit by a drought or really high temperatures, those perceptions start to change and people realize that they have nothing to feed their animals. Because now all you have is that C3 species not a lot of diversity, so if you actually reduce the length of your grazing season. So it is a big problem and remember this as we kind of go through the data on the human dimensions because it will matter that level of invasion and can be showed to the, in terms of management, that level of invasion matters. One important thing is that even though talk about burning and different management practices, once you start getting that invasion of bluegrass, not everyone is going to be willing to have different management treatments. And there's different ecological, social, economic factors of either managing or not managing these areas. And those all have to be taken into account when you kind of propose different treatments to landowners. And in particular, like prescribed fire, big social barriers in terms of what I spoke earlier about some of those barriers to adoption of fire. So in 2018, we decided this survey to look at the different acceptability and management intentions towards management of an invasive grass in North Dakota. So, and we talk about invasive grass, not just Kentucky bluegrass or smooth brome, even though those are two important grasses, we wanted to broaden it to any invasive species to just kind of get a broad view of invasive species in general and see how that acceptability of an invasive grass would affect those management intentions. So our objective was to understand how changes in ecosystem services relate to landowners' acceptance of and management intentions for invasive grasses. Again, invasive grasses in general, not just Kentucky bluegrass, not just smooth brome, but we did have questions embedded within this survey about Kentucky bluegrass mainly. And we'll go with the results of that in a bit. So what we did was create a transit across North Dakota. We sampled nine different counties. Each of these nine counties, we try to send 142 different surveys to landowners who had 1,000 acres or more of land. And this was a survey that we sent out about 10 changes, 40-something questions. If you were one of the landowners who responded to that survey, thank you very much. And so our actual sampling frame was about 1,278, I believe, total male surveys that got sent out. And we got a response of about 509 surveys, which was fairly decent, but not as great as we would have wanted to. Actually, sample size 1,219. So I said 278, but there were surveys, address had changed, people had moved, things like that. So some of those surveys weren't deliverable. So our effective sample size ended up being 1,219. So what we did was we did a vignette, factorial survey experiment, which was embedded within this survey. So the survey in general was asking about those management intentions and acceptability of the grass. But we did this little experiment where we had vignettes that varied in level of acceptability of these different phenomena. And the phenomena that we were interested were the seven ecosystem services. And we varied the level at which the seven different ecosystem services affected their grassland. So this is just an example of one of the vignettes. We had four different, or we had several different vignettes, but landowners in one survey only answered to four of these different examples. So there were several different versions of the survey that got mailed out to each land, or to different landowners. So in this vignette, we talk about new grass species expanding onto your native range lands and based on current scientific research and best available information from other landowners. You know that once this grass establishes and then you go into the different ecosystem services and kind of gauge that. And I'll show you in a little bit what the different ecosystem services were and the level of variability in that. So we already saw. So for each vignette, the landowners were asked to rate the acceptability of that invasive grass on their land and then whether they intended to manage, they would intend to manage that invasive based on that level of acceptability. So the seven ecosystem services that we looked at were forage availability, forage quality, forage quantity, floral resources, water availability, grassland bird diversity and grass diversity. All of them have three different levels of variation from a kind of normal, less than normal and above except for forage availability, which just had spring, summer and late summer forage availability and grass diversity also kind of was a different pattern where you had significantly less, somewhat less and no change. But for all the others, you had less, no change and more. So basic results, we had a 32% response rate. Even though we had about 509 responses, only 207 responded to the whole vignette survey experiment. So our sample size for the survey, for the factorial survey experiment was 207. We had pretty good coverage across the whole area, east to west. And if you noted before in that transit, east to west on the east side, you had mostly cropland producers. And as you move west, you start getting more into that integrated crop and livestock and more livestock towards the west. So we were trying to target that whole range of variability in terms of management and landowner types. Most of the, of our respondents were full-time producers or agricultural producers. And a lot of their income came from their operations. And a lot of them, like most of the uses were concentrating livestock, crops, and then crop and livestock. So our conceptual framework for the models that we did were we had the seven ecosystem services and we changed the levels of those ecosystem services based on those vignettes to rate acceptability of invasive grass. And then that acceptability would lead towards management intentions for those invasive grasses. So not surprisingly, mixed models approach kind of found that as level of acceptability changed, it explained a lot of the variance in management intentions. So in other words, the more unacceptable our grass was found, the more intentions to reduce or manage that grass. Makes a lot of sense, pretty straightforward. I would have expected this anyway, but it's good to see that it does follow what we had predicted in our conceptual framework. Then we look at the acceptability of all ecosystem services. And we found that significant correlation between that acceptability and those ecosystem services. And we saw that if invasive grass came in and did not affect an operation, did not affect the status quo, and you did not see any changes in any of the other ecosystem services, it would be found as slightly acceptable. So we use that as a baseline where it's slightly acceptable. And once we had that baseline, what we did was look at each one of the ecosystem services and the vignettes and kind of how tweaking each one of those ecosystem services would change that acceptability. So for the one on top here, we see that if the seven ecosystem services are maximized, like we're seeing the best that we could see after this grass invades and we're actually seeing increases in ecosystem services, it was found to be slightly acceptable. But if that invasive grass comes in and it reduces all ecosystem services, it was found extremely unacceptable. So there's kind of a, it's not very symmetric there in terms of whether the max benefits versus max losses and kind of this led us to come up with an idea that a lot of the management that's happening is more reactive than proactive. So landowners are reacting to those losses more than to gains. So once they see that ecosystem services on their land are being greatly affected, they are more likely to actually change versus thinking ahead and trying to manage ahead of time. And as we saw with Kami's talk, if you wait till it's fully invaded, you might not see the results you want to see once you start applying those management treatments. And when we look at whether it benefits forage, if the invasive grass that comes in produces some forage that will keep the full length of your grazing season in terms of the C3 kind of early in the season and then having some forage later in the season, it was found to be just slightly more acceptable than the baseline. If it hurts forage, then it was unacceptable. If it benefits forage, hurts birds and pollinators, it was a little less acceptable than the baseline. And if it benefits forage, hurts everything else, fairly unacceptable. And then we plot Kentucky bluegrass and how it has changed different ecosystem services. And we found that it was found to be barely unacceptable compared to that baseline. Then we look at that graph I showed earlier and kind of plot where those levels of Kentucky bluegrass fall within that acceptability and willingness to manage kind of graph come out. And you see that at maximum loss, maximum loss here of Kentucky bluegrass, there is definitely a willingness to control or reduce it. But when you move down to moderate, F here, it's kind of neutral, a little bit below neutral, so not that much willingness to reduce or control it. But at early stages, this G, it's towards the acceptable side of neutral. So there's not that much willingness to manage it. And that to me has a kind of important implications in terms of the research that we do and how we kind of get that on the ground. So people are not really, or our respondents are not really keying into those increases in bluegrass. They're kind of like just, it provides forage. And it has some ecosystem benefits for them in terms of forage production. So it's not seen as totally negative. But then again, once you start getting that full invasion of Kentucky bluegrass, where all you have is bluegrass and you get hit by one of those warmer, drier spells and all you have is a C3 grass, then that's when people start realizing, oh, might be too late. I have too much Kentucky bluegrass. So being proactive, really important and kind of promoting that productivity and kind of that early intervention is really important. So in conclusion, ecosystem services are useful to understand the acceptability and management intentions of Kentucky bluegrass. So those seven ecosystem services that we picked were important in explaining this. And we picked those seven based on theory and interviews that Chandra did with many of you here. So thank you very much for that. So those ecosystem services came out as kind of the most salient in terms of those interviews and the ones that landowners would respond to. Again, North Dakota landowners who responded to our survey had a prior to be a loss averse. They're more sensitive to those reductions in ecosystem services than to gains. And at early stages of invasion, Kentucky bluegrass was found to be acceptable and landowners had no management intentions to control it. So again, thank you forward. We know that Kentucky bluegrass is going to keep invading going to keep taking over so we don't do something about it early. We might be in trouble. So acting early being proactive is important and pushing that is important too. With that, I'll take any questions.