Department of Defense (DoD) resource managers face significant challenges for managing core communities and ecosystem functions in the face of increasing and interacting landscape stressors. The goal of this project is to employ new technology and a transdisciplinary research effort to improve the understanding and management options for assessing and restoring resilient plant and soil communities on DoD lands. This effort will inform the creation of a robust set of tools, maps, and frameworks, as well as a DoD dryland restoration manual, for assessing and restoring biocrusts and associated plants on DoD dryland sites.

This work utilizes two significant technological advances related to the understanding of and management options for dryland ecosystems, focusing on 1) new tools for remotely sensing and assessing biocrusts and 2) for restoring biocrusts following disturbance. Dryland ecosystems are exceptionally difficult to restore following disturbance, as low precipitation, high temperatures, unpredictable weather, and low soil fertility interact to create challenging conditions for restoring communities and their function. Indeed, the restoration success of native plants in western U.S. drylands is notably poor, putting many ecosystems and their resources at risk. Increasingly, land managers have requested more information about the potential to restore biocrusts – a soil surface photosynthetic community ubiquitous and drylands, which have exceptional potential to stabilize soils, reduce exotic plant invasion, increase soil fertility, and benefit native plants. This promising approach faces challenges the research addresses, including quantifying biocrust cover across larger scales, as well as improving the understanding of biocrust composition, function, and response to change; of effective biocrust propagation and delivery methods; and exploring synergies for concurrently restoring plant and soil communities. An improved understanding of how to assess and restore biocrust communities can provide DoD, as well as other land managers, a way forward for restoring native plant and soil communities and, in doing so, increasing ecosystem function, diversity, and resilience.

Roughly 70% of DoD lands consist of installations in western U.S. drylands. These installations provide critical pre-deployment training grounds that aid in national security. DoD’s drylands are experiencing landscape changes that could compromise use of these valuable training lands. The novel biocrust remote sensing and restoration tools combined in this project could vastly advance DoD’s options for assessing biocrust communities across scales and restoring installation training lands to their full capabilities. (Anticipated Project Completion - 2027)