Pathways to Better Management

While conservation ownership now protects a majority of the region’s remaining large grasslands, many critical management challenges remain. One common challenge is that woody vegetation is expanding into grasslands across the region. A second is that many rare grassland-dependent plant and animal species continue to decline on many properties. A third challenge is the spread of non-native plant species into sandplain grasslands from surrounding lands. Lastly, all sandplain grasslands must now be managed in ways that consider the effects of rapid changes in and disruptions to climate. Most of these challenges occur widely and have common threads across the northeast region.

Although some sandplain grassland managers have experience from sandplain grasslands across a wide geographical region, there are also many that do not. Many managers have experience with some management tools, like fire, but have not attempted others, such as grazing. Although some of the information on the outcomes of sandplain grassland management actions or experiments is published in the scientific literature, much is either in other reports and “gray” literature. Some of this information is largely unwritten in any form, but resides in the experience of individual land managers and management practitioners. There could be great value to managers and practitioners by the distribution of information on both the successes and failures of sandplain grassland management experiences.

These challenges and the desire to share lessons learned from management experiences motivated managers to meet in April 2016 and form a Sandplain Grassland Network. This meeting took place at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA. At that meeting, the Network committed to an activity designed to: (1) capture management experiences across the region, and (2) to disseminate this information. The group wanted the activity to review what we now know about different approaches to management and make available out-of-print and hard-to-get reports and other sources of detailed information. The activity would also point to management actions that might not have been previously tested—but should be. It would recommend approaches to improving monitoring of sites and management actions or experiments that are separated geographically and temporally. Lastly, it would recommend approaches to management that collective experience suggests will foster grasslands and the biodiversity they support in the face of continued pressures of expanding human land use and a changing climate.

This web-based document is the result of that activity. It was produced by assembling and evaluating dozens of publications and reports provided by managers and practitioners. It is based on that literature, but also on more than 40 in-person and phone interviews with managers.