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Scientists Join Militarys Quest: Plants That Take a
Lickin and Keep On Tickin
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At the Yakima Training Center
in Washington State, researchers
are evaluating the damage from
military tank tracks.
(K9496-2)
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Ever have one of those days when you
wake up feeling like you've been run over by a tank? Welcome to the world of
plants that end up on a military training site. For them, getting run over by a
70-ton tank, a 27-ton Bradley fighting vehicle, or an assortment of other
hefty, wheeled or tracked machines is all in a day's work.
But the Army has a secret weapon for restoring and revegetating these
hardworking sites when the training maneuvers are over. The military has
enlisted the help of a top-notch team of ARS plant geneticists, led by Kay H. Asay,
to develop training-resilient plants. Now in its sixth year, the project is
based at the ARS Forage and Range Research Laboratory in Logan, Utah, and is
funded by ARS and the U.S. Department of Defense Strategic Environment Research
and Development Program, Washington, D.C.
Asay and colleagues are offering improved lines of native and introduced grasses.
The new plants are better able to withstand trampling by soldiers and
grinding and crushing by their busy vehicles. That's important because
military training installations "are some of the most intensively
used lands in the United States," says Asay. |
At the Yakima Training Center in
Washington State, researchers
evaluate how ARS-developed grasses
respond to damage from military
tanks, soldiers, and equipment.
(K9496-1)
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According to Army agronomist Antonio
J. Palazzo, who works at Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory,
Hanover, New Hampshire, the outdoor maneuvers that inadvertently shred and mash
plants are essential to training. "Today's soldiers can learn a lot from
training sessions with Nintendo-type simulators and from classroom
lectures," he says, "but they still need real-world experience, or
what we call live training. That means living outdoors several days at a time
and learning how to shoot mortar rounds accurately when you're short of sleep
and exhausted.
"At the same time, we have a responsibility to manage ecosystems as best
we can. And presidential initiatives now instruct us to use native plants when
possible and to help stop the spread of invasive weeds."
So Palazzo recruited Asay and colleagues for help. The Logan scientists have an
impressive track record when it comes to developing rugged plants that flourish
in the harsh rangelands of the arid West. Their new varieties, for example,
offer nutritious forage for livestock and wildlife, stabilize erosion-prone
slopes, and provide an option for landscaping roadsides.
Several of the rangeland varieties developed by the research team are among the
best performers in tests at two Army bases where they have established test
plotsthe Yakima Training Center near the city of Yakima, in central
Washington, and Fort Carson, south of Colorado Springs, Colorado. The findings
from these sites should be applicable to many other military bases throughout
the West, where there's an ongoing need for low-maintenance, noninvasive,
self-sustaining plants.
Agronomist Palazzo's part of the research includes getting to the root of the
revegetation problems; he is working with the Logan team to compare the ability
of candidate plants to quickly form vertical roots or lateral ones called
rhizomes. He also measures how well test plants resist being uprooted by tanks
or other traffic.
Asay and colleagues Kevin B. Jensen and Blair L. Waldron of the Logan
laboratory work with Palazzo to select speciesor mixtures of
speciesfor testing at the two Army bases. They try different planting
designs; for example, they might vary the spacing within and between rows. They
monitor plant performance in study plots at the bases and in nurseries at
Logan. They select and cross promising parent plants and then scrutinize the
offspring, looking for superior candidates for further testing.
The scientists are collaborating with an expert in rangeland restoration, R.
Deane Harrison, formerly of USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service.
Meanwhile, in laboratory experiments at Logan, Steven R. Larson and Richard
R.-C. Wang use high-tech procedures to probe plant genetic materialor
DNA. They are looking for traits that dictate adaptability and boost chances of
plant survival. Larson, for example, has provided some of the first-ever
information on the range of genetic diversity in several bluegrass species.
Wang has pinpointed markers signaling the presence of an unwanted, purplish
color in wheatgrasses caused by the pigment anthocyanin.
Earlier observations by the Logan team's research leader, N. Jerry Chatterton,
suggest that the pigmentation is often a sign that the plant may grow more
slowly than others during early spring. A slowpoke plant might not be able to
outcompete faster-growing weeds.
YakimaSagebrush and Bunchgrass
Snow-covered in winter and typically dry and parched all summer, the Yakima
Army Training Center lies in the shadow of the Cascade Mountains. The center is
populated primarily by sagebrush and bunchgrasses. Few trees flourish
thereexcept the cottonwoods, willows, and box elders that line the banks
of creeks and streams. Rocky outcrops of basalt lava dot the landscape, which
climbs gently from 1,200 feet to peaks nearly 5,000 feet high. Wildlife is
plentiful, including jackrabbits, mule deer, elk, pheasant, sage grouse, barn
owls, bald and golden eagles, and dozens of species of songbirds.
Many native grasses thrive at the training center, including Sandberg
bluegrassa relative of the familiar Kentucky bluegrass and a favorite
forage of mule deer and elk. Blair Waldron is closely monitoring a nurseryful
of Sandberg bluegrass collected from more than two dozen different sites. The
goal: To develop a variety that is more genetically diverse and thus better
adapted to a broader range of environments.
Snake River wheatgrass has been the top-performing native grass at Yakima.
Kevin Jensen is working to make it even more resilient. He has an experimental
strain ready for advanced testing.
Vavilov Siberian wheatgrass, developed at the Logan lab, is among the best of
the nonnative plants tested so far at the Yakima base, followed by CD-II
crested wheatgrass, also a product of Logan's plant-breeding program.
Revegetation in the Foothills
On the other side of the Rocky Mountains, the scientists are helping develop
better plants for Colorado's Fort Carson. Extending eastward from foothills of
the Rockies to the fringes of the Great Plains, the base boasts prairielike
ecosystems of blue grama, western wheatgrass, little bluestem, and
needle-and-thread grass; oak woodlands; shrublands covered with pinyon pine and
juniper; and montane forests of ponderosa pine.
This 137,400-acre expanse supports prairie dogs, coyotes, foxes, black bears,
mountain lions, bobcats, elk, mule deer, and over 200 kinds of birds.
The Logan team is eager to finish work on an improved western wheatgrass.
"Right now," says Waldron, "Fort Carson needs a native plant
that develops quickly. Typically, it may take 2 or 3 years to get a healthy
stand of western wheatgrass established. That's too long. It presents too much
opportunity for topsoil to erode and for noxious weeds like
cheatgrasswhich is very aggressive and highly flammableto take
over."
Customized Seed Mixes
Other work for Fort Carson may yield a superb seed mixture. This customized
blend will include the top-performing species for bringing back damaged sites.
One mix that's doing well combines the Logan laboratory's new RoadCrest crested
wheatgrass and the lab's older Bozoisky Russian wildrye with the Army's own
blend of natives like slender wheatgrass, Indian ricegrass, sideoats grama, and
lovegrass.
"If you seed only natives, they don't hold up against fast-growing
weeds," says Asay. "But the combination of RoadCrest, Bozoisky, and
natives that we're testing crowds out most weeds and holds the soil in place.
That means the native grasses have a better chance to get
established."By
Marcia
Wood, Agricultural Research Service Information Staff.
This research is part of Rangeland, Pasture, and Forages, an ARS National
Program (#205) described on the World Wide Web at
http://www.nps.ars.usda.gov.
To reach scientists mentioned in this story, contact
Marcia Wood, phone (301) 504-1658,
fax (301) 504-1641. |
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"Scientists Join Militarys Quest: Plants That
Take a Lickin and Keep On Tickin" was published in the
October 2001
issue of Agricultural Research magazine.
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Last Modified: 02/05/2009
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