美国国家公共电台 NPR A Sea Of Sagebrush Disappears, Making Way For Fire-Prone Cheatgrass（在线收听）

NOEL KING, HOST:

Hundreds of thousands of acres of land are going up in flames every year. A lot of it is rangeland. It's home to rural ranching communities and the endangered sage grouse. Ashley Ahearn brought us this story from Elko, Nev.

ASHLEY AHEARN, BYLINE: Jon Griggs has been running the Maggie Creek Ranch for almost 30 years. In 2007, wildfire tore through thousands of acres and destroyed several ranch buildings. The wind howled. The sky was orange. And Griggs couldn't see more than a dozen yards in front of him with all the smoke. He kicks the dirt with his black cowboy boot, and his voice catches in his throat when he talks about it.

JON GRIGGS: We thought, that's not going to happen to us. And it got us. And I think about that day. I don't like to think about that day.

AHEARN: Griggs and other locals will tell you there's always been fire here. But now the fires are bigger and more frequent than anyone can remember. In just the past two years, more than 800,000 acres of sagebrush have burned in northern Nevada alone. Climate change is at least partially to blame. But there's another, more immediate culprit.

GRIGGS: We're standing in the culprit right here. That's cheatgrass.

AHEARN: Griggs bends down and picks up a sprig of yellow-green spindly grass with a tufted head. Cheatgrass is an invasive species that's out-competing sagebrush and other native plants in rangelands across the West. But unlike sagebrush, which tends to burn every 50 to a hundred years, cheatgrass burns every five to 10, and it regrows faster after a fire. So more fire means more cheatgrass, and more cheatgrass means more fire.

JOLIE POLLET: And each time that fire gets a little bit bigger, gobbles up a little bit more native vegetation. And so the cycle is perpetuating.

AHEARN: Jolie Pollet is a fire manager with the Bureau of Land Management in Boise. More than 2 million acres of BLM rangelands burn on average each year. And that number is increasing, thanks in large part to cheatgrass. But Pollet says forest fires still get more funding and attention.

POLLET: There seems to be an imbalance in the amount of resources and conversation in terms of policy and legislation dealing with rangeland fire issues versus forest fire issues.

AHEARN: Caleb McAdoo, a biologist with the Nevada Department of Wildlife, drives his truck through an area that burned last summer in the Martin Fire. It was the largest in state history. Blackened sagebrush skeletons dot the landscape for miles. Gray ash blows in the wind on the horizon.

CALEB MCADOO: It's hard to wrap your head around a fire that's so long that you can drive through all day long and be in the black, burnt landscape. It's a big battle.

AHEARN: The endangered sage grouse population here is struggling, and fire hasn't helped. More than 35 mating sites, or leks, were destroyed in the Martin Fire. Some birds caught fire and flew ahead of the racing flames, trying to escape, only to fall to the earth and ignite more rangeland. Firefighters here call them streamers.

Anyone who's driven across the West might get the impression that there is plenty of sagebrush out here. But for people like McAdoo, who've spent their whole lives here and watched cheatgrass take over more rangeland with each fire, there's a growing sense of loss.

MCADOO: You see it. It's not a sea of sagebrush anymore. We are losing it, and it's truly depressing.

AHEARN: Land managers like McAdoo are working with private landowners to plant native seeds, spray herbicides and use cows for targeted grazing to keep the cheatgrass at bay. But it keeps spreading. And each summer brings more fires that may not make national news very often but tell a story of a landscape that is changing profoundly. For NPR News, I'm Ashley Ahearn in Elko, Nev.