Seasonal Climate Effects in Sagebrush-Steppe Plant Community Production

Abstract

Accurate models and forecasts of plant production are a critical need of stakeholders across the Great Basin for making decisions about seasonal livestock management in a region that is increasingly impacted by wildfires, invasive species and yearly variability in seasonal climate. High quality and spatiotemporally complete gridded climate forecasts are now available through the Climate Prediction Center (CPC) and North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME) programs, but these forecasts are limited to monthly precipitation and temperature parameters. A necessary first step to creating plant production forecasts is to quantify the spatiotemporal relationships between plant production and these basic climate inputs. The objective of this study was to quantify how seasonal precipitation and temperature affected plant production among the plant species Poa secunda and the functional groups of perennial grasses, perennial forbs, annual grasses, and annual forbs within five ecological states in the Great Basin Sagebrush Steppe over a 10-year period. In general, cooler and wetter spring conditions and cooler summer temperatures in the preceding year were the strongest drivers of plant production across most ecological states and within plant functional groups. These differences were, however, dependent on the given ecological state and plant functional group. These findings indicate that plant production forecasting is feasible for this ecosystem during the growing season when using the climate metrics provided by the CPC and NMME program.