Larch Company Western Juniper Position Paper

By Andy Kerr

(Subject to revision, amendment or withdrawal.)

• Western juniper is a native species and an important component of more than thirty natural vegetation communities in Oregon. ^[2]

• Junipers can live many hundreds of years (some have been estimated at approximately 1,700 years of age), either as individual trees or in stands of ancient woodlands.

• The range and abundance of western juniper has increased significantly since European invasion of the American West, often at the expense of other native plants and ecological values.

• Juniper encroachment into grasslands and deserts is primarily caused by the intrusion of livestock and the exclusion of fire, and secondarily by climatic variation.

• Livestock grazing has/continues to remove understory vegetation necessary to carry natural periodic ground fires that prevent most juniper seedlings from becoming established.

• Ninety percent of all junipers in Oregon are less than 150 years old.

• While most conservationists agree with livestock operators that the exclusion of fire is a primary cause of juniper expansion, ranchers generally do not acknowledge the role of livestock grazing in spreading juniper.

• In some cases, livestock grazing has eroded topsoil and decimated the vegetative understory in shrub-steppe ecosystems, creating dry, rocky conditions dominated by western juniper.

• The solution to juniper encroachment is the reintroduction of fire and the elimination of livestock grazing in grassland and desert ecosystems.

• Fire (natural and prescribed) should be reintroduced only after livestock have been removed from an area for a sufficient period to allow for recovery of native vegetation and regeneration of soils.

• Fire, both natural and prescribed, should be used to control juniper once the landscape is demonstrated to be capable of handling the disturbance. Where inadequate ground cover exists to carry a robust fire with of sufficient heat and height to ignite the larger trees, those trees should be individually ignited.

• The use of mechanical methods to treat juniper on public lands, including bulldozers, chainsaws, and chippers is destructive, aesthetically less pleasing and, most importantly, less effective over large tracts and fails to provide the many ecological benefits of fire.

• Commercial uses of juniper from public lands should not be promoted without assurances that they will not expand to unsustainable levels of industrial exploitation.

• Before juniper treatments occur on public lands, it must be determined if the goal is ecological restoration or the production of forage for domestic livestock; only the former is appropriate.

• All old growth junipers must be protected. Only young junipers established post-European invasion (less than 100-150 years old) should be removed.

• While a native species, the dramatic increase of western juniper has detrimentally affected native, endemic species that require open sagebrush and grasslands. ^[3] Nonetheless, land managers should practice landscape-level ecosystem management rather than local, focal species management.

• Any juniper treatment and subsequent management must consider the potential to exacerbate and take measures to minimize the spread of invasive, non-native species. In some cases, individual ignition of problem junipers is preferable to ground fire to prevent weed invasion (such as cheatgrass).

Footnotes

^[1] The Larch Company gratefully acknowledges advice from Rick Brown, Defenders of Wildlife, Portland, Oregon; Katie Fite, Committee for Idaho's High Desert, Boise, Idaho; and Mark Salvo, American Lands, Seattle, Washington, in developing this paper. The opinions expressed are those of The Larch Company.

^[2] Oregon Biodiversity Project. 1998. Oregon's Living Landscape. Defenders of Wildlife. Washington, DC: 166.

^[3] Otherwise suitable sage grouse habitat is rendered unsuitable by juniper invasion. Individual trees serve as unnatural perches for raptors and displace sagebrush, grasses and forbs needed by sage grouse.