R. Scholtz D.T. Fogarty D. Twidwell T.L. Walker Jr. Caleb Powell Roberts 2022 <ol class=""><li><p>Of all terrestrial biomes, grasslands are losing the most biodiversity the most rapidly, so there is a critical need to document and learn from large-scale restoration successes.</p></li><li><p>In the Loess Canyons ecoregion of the Great Plains, USA, an association of private ranchers and natural resource agencies has led a multi-decadal, ecoregion-scale initiative to combat the loss of grasslands to woody plant encroachment by restoring large-scale fire regimes. Here, we use 14 years of fire treatment history with 6 years of grassland bird monitoring and remotely sensed tree cover data across 136,767 ha of privately owned grassland to quantify outcomes of large-scale grassland restoration efforts.</p></li><li><p>Grassland bird richness increased across 65% (90,032&nbsp;ha) of the Loess Canyons, and woody plant cover decreased up to 55% across 25% (7408&nbsp;ha) of all fire-treated areas.</p></li><li><p>This was accomplished with extreme fire treatments that killed mature trees, were large (mean annual area burned was 3100&nbsp;ha), spatially clustered and straddled boundaries between invasive woodlands and remaining grasslands – not heavily infested woodlands.</p></li><li><p>Findings from this study provide the first evidence of human management reversing the impacts of woody encroachment on grassland birds at an ecoregion scale.</p></li></ol> application/pdf 10.1002/2688-8319.12119 en British Ecological Society Large-scale fire management restores grassland bird richness for a private lands ecoregion article