 So our last presentation for the day is Dr. Clark. Dr. Shannon Clark is the leadership and development manager for the upper mountain Great Plain region for Envy. Envy. Envy. Looks like a boom. I can tell. It does. Shannon received her PhD in weed science from Colorado State University. She continued her research there as a postdoc focusing on evaluating herbicides with emphasis on invasive species management on range land. And ROWs, that's it. Right-of-ways. Right-of-ways, I should know that. And right-of-ways before starting with Envy, Shannon continues to collaborate with Colorado State University weed science as a faculty affiliate. Welcome, Shannon. Great, thanks. Well, I'm definitely going to change it up and I am going to be talking about annuals. So the last talk was kind of a great segue into talking more about these annual species but I promise I have that invasive perennial component in here too. I'm hoping to just stress the importance of looking out for these annuals coming into the Great Plains Eco Region because it's a new issue we're now dealing with. So, and they have a lot of the same effects that we talk about with smooth brome and Kentucky bluegrass in terms of events to pollinators, biodiversity declines and forage quality and quantity. So, invasive winter annual grasses. So unlike the perennials we've been talking about, obviously they're annuals. They typically germinate in the fall but they can germinate in the spring really anytime. The growing conditions are right when we get some cool wet weather followed by a warm-up. They do start growing. They overwinter in a semi-dormant state so they don't go quite fully dormant. And then in the spring, they get started really early and so they're able to deplete that moisture and nutrients that our perennials would take advantage of. And then they synest by late spring, early summer, when our perennials are usually just getting started and create this kind of fine fuel layer on the surface of the soil. They're also prolific seed producers since they are annuals and we'll be talking a lot about why that's important in just a second. But just to show the spread a little bit. Ooh, the pointer is working for me, so that's good. So this is cheatgrass. That's probably all I've heard of cheatgrass. It's the most common winter annual that we deal with. When you see you get into this Great Plains region, it's not as prevalent as in the arid Western US. And so not as much of a problem here that we've noticed, although as the climate gets warmer, we might see that become more of a problem. But what I really wanted to focus on today and what I'll be talking mostly about is Ventinata. And so Ventinata is a winter annual that just, it has a little bit different pattern of invasion than cheatgrass and that it spreads very rapidly in this circled area. So that was its first kind of report to the US, or yeah, USDA plants that are edmaps that it was in the Great Plains eco region. And so that was 2016 Sheridan County Wyoming where they found actually both Medusa Head and Ventinata the same year. Since then, they've found thousands and thousands of acres of Ventinata and it's rapidly spreading. So you pull up edmaps and that's what you get, but this is actually the map created by the University of Wyoming for known infestations of Ventinata. And you'll see this is, it was just found in South Dakota last year. Here's Montana, Eastern Montana, there's Wyoming. And so not reported in North Dakota yet, but on all the borders, we're seeing rapid expansion into the Great Plains eco region. So this species, the reason we're so concerned with it is it provides basically no livestock or wildlife forage value. There's a high silica content, they won't graze it. So unlike cheatgrass that you can graze off early in the year, you can't with Ventinata. You also see it invading wetter sites, non-disturbed sites, unlike cheatgrass, which really likes to get its foothold in disturbed areas or maybe in a drought year, Ventinata will come into those wet areas, smooth brome area, so it can actually outcompete smooth brome. And so it's been extremely worrisome in the fact that they've been, the University of Wyoming has partnered with a lot of other people I'll show at the end to really take management actions against this species. So just an example of cheatgrass choking out, perennials are what it can do to a system. And then there's Ventinata, so similar things. And just that it impacts that biodiversity, your pollinator plants, wildlife habitat, things like that. So I just wanted to show this because I think this is important and critical to why I wanted to give this talk here because the fact that the Great Plains don't have a lot of Ventinata yet. And so in the past with cheatgrass, we've been a lot of in this reactive management system, but where should we work? We really should be working in those proactive systems where as soon as the invasion gets started, we manage. And so we can save those desirable native species because it's really hard to take the landscape back once you get to this. So thinking about managing the seed bank is really important as we switch from these perennial species, which I'll include also in the management. I promise I'm gonna talk about those smooth brome and bluegrass, but these annual grasses, you really have to think in terms of managing the seed bank. So every year you get the seed ring, it's that deposit into the soil seed bank. They withdraw that in the form of germination. A lot, most of the seed does germinate the following year, but that seed bank can persist longer than that, which there was some great work done at Colorado State University showing that just with a long-term study utilizing glyphosate to burn down any current growing plants. So what they did was they utilized one to five years of glyphosate applications to just manage any growing plants to evaluate the seed bank. So when they managed for one year by year two, this was on cheatgrass, but the cheatgrass biomass was right back to where you started on year two. This is two years of management with glyphosate, then you stop managing, you start getting that infestation coming back in three years of glyphosate applications or management. If you stop managing, you still had viable seed in that seed bank. So it was really four and five years of management where you stopped seeing that seed, or stopped seeing the cheatgrass reemerge from the seed bank. They collected soil cores at this point in time, took them back to the greenhouse, grew them up. And so you really see that impact from the four and five years of management, not having a lot of viable seed left. And in fact, some of these are perennial species that grew up in these pots. So really our long-term treatment success is gonna be dependent on managing the seed bank of these species, not just the actively growing plant. So what tools do we currently have? If you've ever tried grazing and mowing and fire, so a lot of the same tools we're talking about with these perennial invasive grasses. But in the past, we haven't had a lot of great options for long-term control. But I started working on a project in 2016. So that's what I'm gonna focus the rest of this presentation on, is kind of the results we're seeing from this long-term project we've been following with the use of a newer herbicide called endazoflam. It's sold in their brand names, Esplanade or Rejuva. Rejuva is the range and pasture product. It's a cellulose biosynthesis inhibitor, which is a new mode of action to range land. So it's a pre-emergent herbicide, pre-Germination herbicide really. But as you spray it, the herbicide really stays in the top part of the soil profile. It's worked into the soil solution with moisture and it controls these annual species as they land their seed on the soil surface and try to germinate. But at the same time, our perennial species, which we're dealing mostly with perennials in these systems, are protected with their root zone below that active herbicide layer. It's a three and a half to seven ounce use rate, five ounces is the average and the max rate for gray sites. So I'm just gonna get into a bunch of the research projects we've been doing to kind of lead you through the showing the impacts these annual grasses are having on these ecosystems by what we've seen with the improvements with treatment. So this is a long-term Ventinata research project that was done in Sheridan County in partnership with Dr. Brian Miller there. And these were just three by nine meter herbicide trial-sized plots done with the CO2 backpack sprayer. There was several applications of endaziflam and then in combo with both amazapic or remsulfuron and they were applied in June, July or August. So kind of an early pre, a pre-emergent or a late pre-emergent timing. And so what we see is these are all of our treatment combinations. They all did include endaziflam and then we have our non-treated here. This is Ventinata cover on the X-axis and then we have our different timings here with our treatments. So we have really low Ventinata cover within all of our treatments one year after we flipped it two years after it actually gets better. This is because the herbicide is a longer lasting herbicide in the soil. It works its way in with moisture. So we actually often see improvements that second year after treatment. The third year, notice that this Y-axis changed with the X-axis changed with the numbers here. There's very low Ventinata cover that year because we were in severe drought but you'll see we have no Ventinata cover within the treatments still. And then we flipped to perennial grass cover. So again, we have cover on the X-axis here and you'll see good results in terms of increases in perennial grass cover. And that's one year after treatment, two years after treatment, still similar results. Three years after we were in a drought so we don't quite see those persisting and I didn't have the data yet from 2022 to show but we'd expect that to bounce back up once we got some moisture. This was following a really, really severe drought year but to just show those increases throughout the year and maintaining them is really positive. Then I wanted to show some more stuff that the University of Wyoming, they took this study further to look at the forage quality and quantity. And so we look at the changes in forage quality by removing that annual grass, that Ventinata from the system. What they did was they looked at over the months of the growing season and you see higher crude protein content pretty much besides in the early growing season, you see higher crude protein through the rest of the growing season and higher TDN. This doesn't take into account that livestock won't even graze Ventinata anyway so it doesn't even matter what the quality is but you're opening up a higher quality forage for those animals. We also see improved forage quantity with the removal of Ventinata. And so this is just showing the annual grass biomass and so the brown lines are the treatment. So basically there's no annual grass biomass within there. This is just through the season. So you kind of see that decline as it senesces and dies off in the fall. But with perennial grass biomass, you see similar amounts within the treated and non-treated early in the season but then you see that huge spike increase in perennial grass biomass with the treatment where you've removed that Ventinata it's not competing any longer with that perennial grass. So that's just an introduction to showing some of what we're seeing on results on these species. So now I'm gonna show some impacts to the native species. We've been doing a huge project following these on the front range of Colorado. So we started a sampling project across the Western US in our operational treatments to kind of sample what were the changes to the ecosystem with these annual grass treatments. And so that was the objective of this study. And so we came up with the sampling design or kind of in partnership with the University of Nebraska. They use some of this where we do, our plots have a center point and then we run three transects off that center point and we do quadrats. And within those quadrats, we collect, we have a little screw tip here on our quadrat. We collect line point intercept information. We record percent frequency of occurrence. We also take dry weight rank which is a way to visually estimate the biomass, the top contributors of biomass within the quadrat. So I'm gonna show a few results. So I promised I would show some of these invasive perennial grasses. And so here these next few sites are example of some interesting treatment combinations where we saw really good impacts to both the annual grass and the exotic perennial grass. So it's kind of a little hard to tell in this picture but this is all smooth brome. This is the non-treated site and there is cheatgrass within this as well. So the treatment was put out in the fall of 2021 and there was both endazoflam and amazopic combined in this treatment. And if you notice over here that treated at 10 months after, you don't see any smooth brome. Well, it's kind of hard to tell but this is actually all Western wheatgrass if you see all the green. And so amazopic, smooth brome is really sensitive to amazopic but we're excited to see that result with that Western actually filling in the place of the smooth brome once we knocked it back with the amazopic. So this is our frequency of occurrence results from the site. And so what you see, what I tried to do is kind of make it a little bit easier to get through all these species but anything with the blue arrow was an increase of that species and abundance on the treated site and anything with a yellow bar or a orange bar is a increase in occurrence on the non-treated site. And so we use binomial confidence intervals to calculate these. So if the confidence interval overlaps there's no significant difference. So we saw was at this site it had been in smooth brome for a long time it wasn't a very diverse site but we do see increases in Western wheatgrass a huge increase in Western wheatgrass in Louisiana vetch but what you see is the smooth brome occurrence over here about 60% over 60% frequency of occurrence in the non-treated where almost no smooth brome found in the treated site. You also see everything that increased within the non-treated we're all exotic species. So like cheatgrass here, Japanese brome, Lysum and so we see really positive results in switching that ecosystem from an invasive ecosystem to back to more native desirable species. Just showing some of the dry weight rank data and we see that treatment switching that site to more of a Western wheatgrass dominated site from a smooth brome and cheatgrass dominated site. So when we switch over to this is getting more into the Southern Rockies eco region but it's right on the fringe of the high plains. So you get a lot of similar species here. This is in the front range of Colorado and Boulder County but just an example. So this treatment was actually done in April of 2021 and it had endaziflam with rimsulfuron to knock back Canada bluegrass. So I know the focus has been on Kentucky bluegrass but they have Canada bluegrass there. They do have some Kentucky bluegrass too that shows up at this site but those CCs are very similar in terms of how they react to herbicide treatments. So I still think it's really applicable to show the information from it but you can just see here the switch this is all Canada bluegrass within here that you're seeing and then you can see that switch here with the herbicide treatment. So there's a lot of species with really, really diverse site and the diversity just increased once we treated it. These aren't even all the species we found. I only did things that had higher than a 10% frequency of occurrence because really the statistics are getting iffy once you get lower occurrence but what we see is these blue dots over here just much higher frequency of most of the native species within that treatment which is really positive too that we didn't impact those native species when we were trying to take out that Canada bluegrass and the cheatgrass that was there. So all those increases in the blue bars then you see the increases in the orange bars here you see most of these are non-natives or these are exotic species. So Canada bluegrass, cheatgrass, Dalmatian, Toadflax, Western Salcify all increased in the non-treated site. Then we flip over to another this is the same at the same location in Lyons but this treatment was actually put out in March of 2018. I wanted to show this because this is data collected four years after because the last one that we just looked at was collected just over a year later. So you might ask, well, what's the long-term benefit? So I wanted to show that. So again, we see that great response with all those native species increasing within our treatment zone but I wanted to point out here Canada bluegrass we do see a little bit of that Canada bluegrass coming back in but it's still really reduced four years after treatment compared to the non-treated which has almost 100% occurrence of Canada bluegrass. So really positive results there four years after treatment. So that's a long lasting treatment just one application. And then again, you see the cheatgrass, Dalmatian, Toadflax, Western Salcify all increased in that non-treated site. So then I'm just gonna quickly go through some additional monitoring we've done for biodiversity impacts from these annual grasses. And this is just to drive the point home of Ventanata's on the spread. And even though this is cheatgrass research Ventanata has the same, if not worse impacts. So it's really why we need to be watching for it and manage it when it does come in to these great plains areas. But this was 14 research locations across Boulder County again. These sites are all considered globally rare and irreplaceable. They have a really high diversity of native species a lot of rare species and species of concern. So the data collection included doing 15 foot belt transects to just monitor presence and absence of species for each site. Each site had a pair treated and non-treated. They were all treated with endaziflam at that seven ounce rate. And then they did some georeferencing of rare species within some of the sites. And then some of the species they recorded flower number per plant. To compare differences in flower number. So just real quick over here. This is the mean species diversity per site from 2019 to 2021. And each year you can see the treated sites. You get more species coming in and more diversity compared to the check sites which stay pretty static throughout those years. This is showing increase of flower number per plant. And so what we did was we took 10 species of a plant on both the treated and non-treated area counted the number of flowers and got a mean number. And so just a few are represented over here but we evaluated 34 species. And all of them had higher numbers of flower per plant in the treated side compared to the non-treated. And why is that? Just because the cheatgrass is using so much of that moisture resource that the reproduction part of the plant is the first thing that it shuts down when it's under drought conditions. And cheatgrass is akin to being in constant state of drought. This is just showing rare concern species. They're a list that they had for their area of rare concern species. But this is just the number of sites they found. The percentage of sites they were finding rare concern species on. Increasing throughout the years with those treatments obviously staying pretty static in the check. This is I think some really cool data because you can visualize. These are some rare or concern plant species for Boulder County that they list as rare concern. And then so they started tracking them. So this is 2020 after a treatment. They're tracking and they've seen some of those rare concern species come back, flipped to 2021, which was actually a pretty dry year. You have a few of those rare species showing up in the check, but you can see they counted over a thousand individual rare plants in the treatment area. And this is the last thing I'm gonna finish up on. So we took six of these sites where we were tracking these diversity measurements on and we tracked pollinator information because we wanted to see, we're seeing more of these flowering forbs come back in. What is that doing to the pollinators? So we set up transects, we did timed pollinator observations, looked at floral resources throughout the growing season. So basically what we saw is this is by week and these are the number of flowering forbs detected on average in the sites. We see each week, several more flowering forbs species detected in the treated sites which is the blue dots compared to the check sites. This is just an overall average richness throughout combined throughout the season. The mean richness was higher in the treated sites. Just an example of, you can see the impact to some of these species with that cheatgrass present. We looked at pollinator groups in the observations. So this would be the mean number of pollinators or these are all arthropods, but the pollinator groups are highlighted here in this red box. But the mean number found per transect, you see significant increases in several of those pollinator groups with this study. So this isn't indicating that the pollinators increased, but that they're using the treated site over the non-treated site. So they're detected more on that treated site because there are more resources. And then same with floral visitor richness, this is just the number of different pollinators or arthropods that were found throughout this assessment. So mid season to late season, we have almost a two times increase in richness in the different pollinator species that we were able to detect on those transects. So kind of just to wrap it up, I wanted to show this landscape scale picture. This is from Sheridan County, Wyoming, because they're really proactive in managing this ventinata right now, but they are achieving landscape scale restoration through these partnerships, which I have a slide on. They have the Northeast Wyoming invasive grass working group. They have now a group called Imagine. And they're partnering to bring money to landowners. They work with NRCS to use like equip money and different grant funding. So they're able to make these treatments on a landscape scale instead of just individuals trying to manage it on their own. So an impact can actually be made and seen across the landscape. So just really cool example of a partnership, but there's several of these going on right now in the Western States, and especially with ventinata Medusa head because they are so aggressive and provide no forage quality. So it's been great working with these groups. And I just wanted to give an example of how these impacts are being, or these management tactics are being used on the landscape. So with that, I got through a lot of data and I know it's the end of the day, but if you have any questions, I will be happy to take them.