 So John is a rangeland scientist with the USDA ARS Center at the Northern Great Plains Research Laboratory near Mandan. He's been there since 1999. Prior to coming to Mandan, John was a rangeland scientist at the USDA ARS station in Du Bois, Idaho, the sheep station in the US, where he worked on the effects of grazing on plant communities, carbon dioxide sequestration in rangelands and using grazing to control noxious weeds. John received his bachelor's of science degree in agriculture at the University of Nebraska in 1984. After a term in the Peace Corps, John received his master's of science at the University of Nebraska in 1992. He received his PhD from Texas A&M in Rangeland Ecology and Management in 1996, I believe his major advisor was Dr. Brisky. And John was previously a postdoc in Mandan before the time period. His long-term goals are to develop range and forward systems that are economically viable and promote long-term agricultural stability. John and his wife, Chris, live in Mandan and have three children. So please welcome John. Yeah, first off, I'd like to start by apologizing to everyone's who's foot I stepped on when I was getting into the middle of the back row. If you're really irritated, my name is Jeff Prince. Yeah. When Jeff asked me to do this talk, I was a little bit nervous about it for several reasons, not because I don't think it's important, it's extremely important, but there's probably a half dozen or a dozen people in the audience who are ecology, teach ecology on a daily basis and could do a more concise job of this. But there's a second reason with that also, and that is the fact that this is a very broad topic. And if we go off of what Eric was just talking about with statistics and we look at probability, usually with these broad topics, you either go like too broad or you go too narrow. And if you look at those probabilities, I probably have about a 10% shot of doing this okay, but we'll go ahead and do it. So with that, I always like to kind of think a little bit about, you know, why we're here. You know, there's why are we all coming here to Fargo, North Dakota and the middle of winter to talk about cool season, perennial invasive grasses. And that's because we have an issue with them, okay? This is some data right here from our location in Mandan. We have some long-term historic pastures there that started in 1916 through 2016 periodically. They looked at the species composition on there. And you can see with Kentucky bluegrass in this case, that from 1916 till about 1984, we're just seeing traces of Kentucky bluegrass. There was hardly any in it. Then something happened between 1984 and 2004 when all at once it rocketed up and became a dominant portion of our species composition there. And it's not just in our location, this happened to be on a Lomi site in North Dakota. This is data from that Shandy Kaiser had from the Knife River Indian Village. And in that area there, he looked at multiple ecological sites in between 1984 and 2007. And he's seeing a very similar trend where we saw, where he saw increases in invasives, in this case, Poa or Kentucky bluegrass and smooth brome, and decreases in the native grasses and native forbs in these sites. And so it was rapid, but it was also broad. And this is some data here that Jeff Prince got for me from the Grand River Grasslands. And this is starting here in 1962. And over here is 2012. And we are seeing decreases in blue grama in Western wheatgrass and increases in not only smooth brome in Kentucky bluegrass, but also crested wheatgrass. So it's a rapid increase. It's a broad problem and there's multiple species. And I think as we go off with Dr. Lam's talk earlier, it's not just in North Dakota or South Dakota, it ranges up to Canada. I've had producers in Montana come and talk to me about Kentucky bluegrass. So it's a widespread problem. So when you have a big problem like this, you wonder on why it happens. And that's when we get into these drivers. And an ecological driver is any natural or human-induced factor that causes a change in an ecosystem. In our case here, we're really kind of interested in these because understanding these drivers, as Eric was pointing out with his discussion, really helps us a better way to focus our control mechanisms and also to understand why things are occurring. And one point I wanna make with this is that these drivers and feedback mechanisms often operate in very dynamic states or situations. And we have to be adaptable when we're thinking about how they operate. Because I can't, because as I mentioned earlier, it's a very broad topic, I'm gonna probably at the end focus on a little bit with nitrogen and this should please everyone. What Dr. Lam was talking about with smooth brome is something that we're actually thinking also occurs with Kentucky bluegrass. And so it's like we have this convergence here which doesn't always happen. And kind of the goal with this talk, with Jeff and I's talk on this is to kind of highlight these, not necessarily to say that this explains everything, but just as a way for people to start thinking about them as you're listening to talks later on. This is, why is that happening? What could be driving that? What are some of the feedback mechanisms in there? So I mentioned that we have to be adaptable with this. And I think some of our early grazing, not early, but some of our previous grazing advice, these top three things really illustrate that quite well. You know, in North Dakota for a long time, there's been this focus on a June one turn on date. And that came from some data that came from our lab, Al Frank, who was at our lab did that. And what he looked at is he said, okay, we feel like these native grasses need three and a half, four leaves in order to be safely grazed. How many growing degrees does it take to get that? And so he kind of developed this equation and work with others to, as a way that you could say, okay, it takes this many growing degree days. That's roughly the end of May, first of June. But as we're looking at that, we also noticed that anecdotally, especially after the invasion started, we're seeing some calving pastures and other things that were grazed early, that we were seeing less degree of invasion in them. And so we looked at this a little bit. We did some work where we tried to graze some pastures hard early at our location. And we did see increases in native species. We did not see a decrease in Kentucky bluegrass, but we also saw some degrees as in smooth brome. Along this, you know, also thinking about rest and deferment, this goes back to what a lot of us were taught in the university where you're looking at a successional theory and the way to get to a more desirable species composition is to reduce the grazing pressure. And, you know, that's the idea there. Sometimes, and I think this study by Todd Grant really illustrated this, that sometimes rest does not always provide those benefits that you think it was. He looked at US Forest Service Land and compared range land next to it. And, you know, it's pretty obvious in that case that the rest what's in doing. I think I said forest service with actually fishing wildlife land and refugees. So I apologize for that. Also the degree of utilization, you know, we've always been taught take half and leave half. There is, you know, sometimes I think with our native, our native range lands, a lot of, a lot of them, they actually go through quite a bit of disturbance. And, you know, we can sometimes I think we try to treat them a little bit too nicely if that makes any sense. Finally, and this is a big one and you'll probably hear quite a bit about it is. And I know David Toledo is going to talk a little bit about this later is, you know, the use of fire. And, you know, we've had a cultural switch so that most of our producers are not as comfortable with using fire. And it's one tool that we do need to think about with this. When I talk about this, I'm just going to look at, you know, some broad processes here. The water, the hydrologic cycle, the nutrient cycle and energy flow and all of these work together to help influence community dynamics. And as Eric pointed out with his talk earlier, it's not just what we're seeing above ground. There's also a lot of the below ground dynamics in here. And this feeds up into pollinators and insects, also as well as the soil microbes and soil phantom. And this just, the idea here is to show that these are all linked. That all of these are linked that you, and when you do something to one, one of these processes, oftentimes there's an impact on another process. And as an example of that, I was going to talk a little bit about the energy cycle. And I'm going to do two things. And if we talk about the energy cycle, which is basically capturing sunlight, turning into plant material that other organisms can use. When we think about this, I'm going to talk about two things, especially with Kentucky bluegrass. One of the things is something that Rachel Christensen is going to talk about later on. But oftentimes we're really lucky in the Northern Plains that oftentimes our precipitation, our hydrologic cycle, the water cycle, and the growing season or the energy cycle match quite well. That we're very lucky about that. And if we look at that from a standpoint, we produce a lot of high quality forage for the amount of water that we get. And if you think about that, usually in central North Dakota, if you're looking at peak biomass on native range lands, you're going to kind of think late June, first of July, something like that for peak. If you look at an invasive range land, say something that's been invaded, especially by Kentucky bluegrass, in our case, you're going to see that switch to much earlier in the year. So a lot of that production is going to become much earlier in the year. Kentucky bluegrass morphology is such that it produces a tremendous amount of vegetative tillers. And so you're okay as long as you get water to carry that through. But if you don't, then all of your productions early in the year and it impacts it. I'm going to talk about this in a little bit different way, though, as the other part is the length of the growing season. And there's been some research that suggests that our growing season has been increasing, well, days. A lot of that increases later on in the year. And that provides a niche there for some of our invasive grasses to use as a way to get a foothold of when our native grasses have not evolved in order to utilize that. For example, most of the invasive grasses, say Kentucky bluegrass or smooth brome or crusted, take a lot fewer growing degree days to produce a leaf than what our native grasses do. And so they can grow in cooler conditions than what our native grasses. When you have that, they can end up increasing in your community, in your species abundance. And when that happens, and again, I'm going to take an example with Kentucky bluegrass here. When that happens, you can see an increase in the thatch layer. Kentucky bluegrass has a lot of roots that are grow pretty shallow. It produces a lot of litter. It ends up with this thatch matte root layer that kind of sits on top of the organic soil surface. That is really a mess chemically. What do I mean by that? It's really complex. There's a lot of different compounds in that. And I think, and this is some work that David Toledo did at our location here, but this impacts the water cycle potentially because Kentucky bluegrass, when it's dry, was hydrophobic. When it's wet, it was hydrophilic. Each of those, in other words, when it was dry, it had a tendency to repel water. When it was wet, it had a tendency to be attracted to water. Both of those can impact the water cycle. And it's not just Kentucky bluegrass. This is crested wheatgrass from that out of Canada that said, because of its higher transpiration, had lower soil moisture underneath there. Also, as we heard, we do know that, oops, that smooth brome alters soil properties and hydrological properties also. Well, I'm going to talk a little bit about the nutrient cycle here and full disclosure here. We have a soil scientist on our location always gets that look on his face. When I talk about anything to do with soils, I kind of suggest you're sitting next to that uncomfortable relative, but Thanksgiving. So take it as that. But what I want to talk to here, just a little bit about is, because we're going to focus on nitrogen a little bit later in this, is look at some of the feedbacks and how they impact the nutrient cycle. And just for example, if you look at decomposition, there are multiple things that affect the decomposition rate, which is the primary way that the above and below ground communities, this primary way you get different nutrients from the above ground community into the below ground. There's a bunch of different ways that look at that, but litter quality impacts that. As we listened or heard about with the soil fauna, the soil microbes, even the environment, if it's cooler, wetter, all of those can impact your decomposition rate. And all of these are feedbacks that go into determining the decomposition rate. So when you look at feedbacks, there's basically two of them. There's kind of positive feedbacks and negative feedbacks to be, you know, there's more of them. I mean, there's more ways that they work, but that's kind of a good generalization with them is to have positive and negative. And it's a little bit counterintuitive in a way, but positive feedbacks have a tendency to move you away from equilibrium. Negative feedbacks have a tendency to keep you in equilibrium. And so what are some potential feedbacks as we're thinking about this with the nitrogen cycle? You know, we mentioned elimination of fire, exotic legumes, you know, a sweet clover puts in a tremendous amount of nitrogen in the soil. We get atmospheric deposition in nitrogen. Soil erosion from croplands can move over, you know, we fertilize our croplands. A lot of times that's brought over onto our range lands through dust, other ways. This is interesting and it goes back a little bit with what we were talking about with smooth brome. We did some work at our location looking at Kentucky bluegrass. One thing we found out with that is that there's a lot more nitrogen in the system, not because Kentucky bluegrass had a higher concentration of nitrogen, but because it just had a lot more biomass out there, you know, a lot more litter. And, you know, we could see the same thing with the thatch and the root man. And in this case, we saw that that was going right down below when it was within our shallow surface, we were seeing higher amounts of nitrogen below Kentucky bluegrass compared to areas where it didn't. So if we look at all these, whenever you have positive feedbacks or greater than negative feedbacks, you go to a new state. And this is, you've probably all, many have seen this, this is a, I think a cup and ball diagram. And, you know, it's more nuanced than this, but I think this is a good diagram to kind of think about this a little bit. And so I kind of like to think if we're in this, I think in our CS we call it a reference state, you know, we might be this place where we have, and then again, I'm looking at Kentucky bluegrass here primarily, we have scattered Kentucky bluegrass. That's what we saw with our plant data early. Pretty scattered bluegrass. If we have something occur, and in our case maybe, you know, if you look at the 1990s in central North Dakota, we got about 25% more precipitation than normal. Prior to that, there was a drought. You know, there's multiple things, you know, that could have occurred there. You know, the Kentucky bluegrass could have produced more. It doesn't seem to be as palatable, but for whatever reason it increased. And when it increased to about 30%, it seems like this is a threshold here where once you get much past 30% of Kentucky bluegrass in your species composition, it's hard to go back. And so then you end up with this place which you saw on that first slide that I showed where you're running about 60 to 70% Kentucky bluegrass in the species composition. We did see an increase also in productivity when we were looking at this, that and not only primary, but also secondary productivity with this, but we saw it noted an overall decrease in species diversity. And so, and this productivity increase is probably highly dependent on the amount of rainfall. And so, you know, these, again, it seems like it tracked a little bit similar to what Dr. Lam talked about with Smooth Moral. So again, looking at some of these positive ones, what are some that could be as, you know, prairie fires were controlled or eliminated? You know, we had increases in available nitrogen. I mentioned a lot of this was not because of concentration, but because of the amounts. And also changes in decomposition rates with invasive grasses. A lot of times our native grasses have a tendency to have a slower rate of decomposition. You know, they recycle their nitrogen more within the plant. Invasive grasses don't always have, or can have a faster rate of decomposition. And so if all those occur, then we're up to this area here, which is the threshold. The negative feedbacks would be things that, you know, native plants are used to having low nitrogen in the system, you know, slower decomposition rates, periodic fire to remove litter that allows it. All of those things help us keep in this original state here. So this is one in actually a Robert Pennington, who has worked for us for a while at David Toledo actually put this together. But I thought it really kind of said what we're thinking happens there with this is that we start off, and again, this is with Kentucky Bluegrass, but you know, from what it sounds like with smooth brome and others, maybe we could put multiple different invasive species in here. But you have some sort of unique environmental circumstance. Like I said, maybe it's the increased rainfall followed, you know, with a drought ahead of that that made it open up spaces. And you know, maybe because of the drought, some of the plants were using as much nitrogen, there was more in the system. I don't know. But Kentucky Bluegrass increased. Livestock don't like to eat it. And you know, especially when it starts to mature, so they're starting to avoid it. So they're putting pressure on the other grasses that are close by there. Because of that, you move over to this threshold area. Once you're in this threshold area, again, it's not grazed. As I mentioned, the concentration's similar, but because there's so much more production here, you have a lot more nitrogen in the system. We have more nitrogen in the system. More nitrogen is going into the soil where the Kentucky Bluegrass can access it easier. And because of that, you end up going from the threshold over to this altered state, which is primarily an invasive species state. And when you look at that state, then you have to realize that the drivers and the feedbacks that you were thinking about in the reference state may no longer be as applicable. For example, if you're in this invaded state down here, resting doesn't favor native plants, it actually favors the exotic species. Reduced stocking rate and utilization may favor the exotic species. The June 1 turnout, because Kentucky Bluegrass and Smooth Brom encrested wheatgrass all start earlier in the spring than our natives may favor the exotic species. So what we have is using some of our concepts with drivers and other things that we previously have thought about as we look at this new system, they're not working quite as well. One thing I don't think we've probably given up enough thought to, and I know David's going to talk a little bit about this with considering fire, is the impact of humans on these processes. And I kind of put together, and then Miranda had organized these campfire sessions at our Society of Range Management. It was really interesting. We sat around a table and people talked about issues with cool season invasive grasses. And the one thing that really kept coming up time after time after time was the human impact on here. And they were talking about some broad things here, as Dr. Lam mentioned, Smooth Brom was used a lot for roadside ditches, not only in Saskatchewan, but also in North Dakota. Also, if you go all the way down to Nebraska, there's a ton of Smooth Brom. They were talking about why invasives are still being pushed, or not being pushed, but still being encouraged for being planted in areas where we know that there's some detrimental aspects to these invasive plants. So all of these were brought up at this campfire, and I think it's worth it to think about how humans can impact some of these drivers. Oftentimes, if we're looking at, say, reclaiming an area, some of our species may not be totally what we thought they were previously. In other words, we're working some with the United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck, and in Native American communities, one of the big concerns they have is that some of the traditional plants, as you go through a variety enhancement, do not have the same properties as the ones that you find out on the range line. I don't know if that's right or not, but I do know that we have changed some of our properties through development, say, of our improved, even our native grasses, some of our improved native grasses, may decompose faster than the native varieties, or the ones that we find in our pastures. There's others here. The exotic legumes, as I mentioned before, how many times I grew up in Nebraska, and I remember driving home sometimes, and it would be from Mandan all the way to the Nebraska border would end up being just yellow with sweet clover. Pasture after pasture, we would see a ton of sweet clover. Soil erosion, how many times have we seen that happen? Deposition, climate change is one. I mentioned the growing seasons are getting longer. That has impacts on what we're seeing. So this kind of comes with, again, with the so what with this, thinking about these drivers. And again, I mentioned that, or we showed that sequence where we made the argument that nitrogen may be a big driver with what we're seeing with Kentucky bluegrass invasion. If that's true, then you start asking, how can we handle this? Is there a grazing method? We've done some work at Mandan with mob grazing and our preliminary data, I think, would say no. From what we've seen, it may reduce it, but we don't necessarily have the same effect that we might otherwise. Fire, do we burn? If we're burning, why is that burning working? Because then that will help us determine the time of year and everything on winter bird. So these are things that we have to think about. And not only do we have to think about why, but when we're thinking about why, we then need to think about how we're going to see if we are making a difference. And this comes into Jeff's favorite topic, which is monitoring. And so, and I think the point here is, if you know what mechanism you're looking at or the impact, then you know what to monitor. And so for example, if you say, I really think those 12 extra days, the year that we're getting with the growing season is important, then you might want to look at, not necessarily looking at species composition, but you may want to look at phenology here. When are things greening up? When are they not greening in the spring? When are they not greening in the fall? You know, oftentimes with bare ground, we may not be looking at bare ground. We may be looking at the lack of bare ground if we're concerned with litter buildup, for example. So with that, I just want to point out, bring up with these conclusions here. The idea here is understanding these drivers and feedback mechanisms, hopefully will help us do a better job of interrupting the feedbacks that favor the exotics. That's the goal here. You know, we need to have good monitoring because once we understand this, then we know what to monitor and it may not be what we're used to monitoring. The final thing, I didn't talk about it much, but I think it's really important. And we do this in targeted grazing quite a bit, is that we really need to think about the one-in-done mentality, like this is a constant process, and it's not, oh, we can do this once and that's going to solve everything. And with birding may be a good example. You may have to burn two or three years to start off with in order to get the effect on the driver that you want. And so with that, thank you very much.