Restoration outcomes in sagebrush steppe are notoriously variable. Resistance and resilience indicators —known as R&R—are widely used by land managers to decide where to focus limited resources on landscapes to improve the odds that restoration efforts will be successful. Researchers evaluated whether several of these indicators were able to predict ecosystem recovery after wildfire and invasion. The study area included burned landscapes in Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, and California, some of which the Bureau of Land Management treated with herbicides, aerial seeding, drill seeding, and planting to aid post-fire recovery. Most of the R&R indicators were uninformative, especially compared with simple metrics like elevation, latitude, and longitude, but one metric that describes the balance between spring precipitation and evapotranspiration—the spring modified Thornthwaite Index-- was somewhat useful for explaining invasive annual grass association abundances. Overall, whole plant community recovery was better explained by elevation than the R&R indicators. More work is needed to operationalize R&R indicators as informative predictors of plant community trajectories at a management-applicable scale.  

Applestein, C.V., and Germino, M.J., 2025, Post-fire recovery of sagebrush-steppe communities is better explained by elevation than climate-derived indicators of resistance and resilience: Journal of Applied Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.14876