Restoring Utah’s damaged landscapes: Ephraim center provides vital seed stocks to heal public lands

Ephraim • Utah and federal officials are wrapping their busiest reseeding seasons in years, tapping a nondescript warehouse in Ephraim where seeds for native grasses and forbs are stored and mixed by the ton.

Wildfires took a heavy toll last summer on the state’s forests and rangelands, which land managers hope to quickly rehabilitate with the help of seed stores at the Ephraim-based Great Basin Research Center, operated by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources.

Airplane pilots dropped 173,000 pounds of seed last week on some of the most severely scorched ground in the Brian Head fire that burned for six weeks last summer on the Dixie National Forest, according to Gary Bezzant, DWR’s southern regional habitat program manager. The 72,000-acre blaze — triggered by a man burning excess vegetation on his property — was Utah’s most destructive wildfire in several years and by far the most expensive to fight, costing $36 million.

Statewide, officials have spread nearly 470,000 pounds of seed on 19 burn areas totaling nearly 68,000 acres, with Brian Head accounting for about half the total tab of $11 million. Another 16,000 acres scorched in last summer’s Onaqui Complex fire will be treated next year.

These totals don’t include 52,000 pounds of sterile triticale seed applied earlier this year in emergency stabilization efforts at Brian Head and elsewhere.

Utah’s Watershed Restoration Initiative coordinates such projects, including acres not affected by fire but in need of work to improve wildlife habitat degraded by livestock grazing, erosion or pinyon-juniper encroachment. All told, at least 830,000 pounds of seeds will pass through the Ephraim warehouse this season, far more than last year.

“In the last 10 years, we have gotten more involved with wildlife habitat restoration, but everything done isn’t always for wildlife,” Bezzant said. Utah’s reseeding projects also help restore fisheries and hydrological function of lands ravaged by fire, dampen erosion and reduce the damage done to roads and property from debris flows, ensuring the nearly $6 million spent rehabilitating the Brian Head burn will pay off.

For decades, federal agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management have relied on DWR’s parent agency, the Utah Department of Natural Resources, for seed stocks to restore public lands. State wildlife officials started the Great Basin Research Center back in the 1950s to figure out how to reverse plummeting mule deer numbers thought to be caused by loss of native plants from overgrazing, according to Danny Summers, DWR’s habitat restoration coordinator. The original goal was to bring back grasses and forbs that big game need to thrive, but through the years the program has evolved to include much broader aims.

For example, sediments flushing through Red Creek Reservoir above Paragonah killed all the fish there and threaten to disrupt municipal water supplies. Officials hope the reseeding will help resurrect the fishery, but it will take three to five years for these new plants to fully take hold

“We will use introduced [nonnative plant] species, but it is preferred to use native species when they are available,” Summers said, but this is not always the case with rare forbs.

The Ephraim center acquires and processes seed under an agreement with the BLM, which operates its own seed warehouses in Ely, Nev., and Boise, Idaho.

The Brian Head burn area is the scene of the most complicated reseeding project in Utah since at least the devastating fire year of 2012, and possibly as far back as the Milford Flat fire of 2007. A walking tour through the burn area north of Brian Head Peak reveals how the flames passed over ridges, canyons and meadows in varied ways, thoroughly scorching some places while leaving adjacent spots just singed or sometimes even unscathed.

Meanwhile, managers for the Dixie National Forest plan to log some of the ponderosa pine killed by the fire soon while it still has economic value.

Last week, seeds landed on basins surrounding Little Creek and Yankee Meadows reservoirs, Clear and Bunker creeks and Horse Valley. “Those are the areas most needing perennial grasses and forbs,” project manager Curtis Roundy. “In the areas we are not seeding, there is evidence grasses will regrow on their own. The fire didn’t burn hot enough for that to happen.”

Elevation and the presence of critical mule deer and sage grouse habitat also played a role in deciding which areas to treat.

“We are trying to maximize the benefit of the money we are putting on the landscape,” Roundy said.

The crews applied different seed mixtures depending on elevation and landownership. High-elevation national forest areas got a five-grass mix dominated by mountain brome and slender wheatgrass, while lower-elevation terrain received 11.5 pounds per acre of a more expensive 11-species, grass-forb mix. Private land, totaling 4,753 acres, received a similar 12-species mix.

Land above 9,000 feet of elevation tends to recover more easily, especially if it is covered in aspen, which regenerates rapidly in response to fire.

“The higher the terrain, the more simple the seed mix,” Bezzant said.

The timing of the reseeding is crucial for the project’s success. Seed should be dropped late enough in the year so it doesn’t immediately germinate, but also before snow covers the ground. The goal is to have the seed contact the soil, then pushed in by the weight of winter snow accumulation, so it sprouts next spring.

That way the plants get a jump-start ahead of cheat grass, a fast-growing invasive weed and scourge across much of the West.

“We have an open window to do something and if we don’t get it done before next growing season, it’s going to take more herbicide,” Summers said. “It is much harder.”

That concern is not as acute at higher elevations, such as the Brian Head burn, because the undergrowth bounces back more quickly in its moist soils. By early September in Sydney Valley, for example, broad-leaf forbs were already pushing through the blackened ash-covered ground.

Cheat grass is a much more serious threat in the valleys and foothills, such as those affected by the Wildcat Fire that burned 13,176 acres Box Elder County in July.

For that project, DWR used seed drills on 9,000 acres, followed by aerial application of shrub seed in uplands areas. Some lands will be sprayed with herbicide to kill cheat grass that germinates in fall.

Forbs, such as clover and milkvetch, are crucial for sage grouse habitat because the flowering, leafy plants support insect communities that nourish young birds.

“Diversity is a good thing on the landscape,” said Kevin Gunnell, a DWR project leader at Great Basin Research Center.

But rare native species can be prohibitively expensive, up to $100 per pound for species such as penstemon, globemallow and milkvetch.

“There are some situation where native forbs are really hard to grow,” Summers said. “We don’t have much on the market we can go buy so when we have a large wildfire, we don’t have a lot available to us.”