Despite years of accumulating scientific evidence that fire is critical for maintaining the structure and function of grassland ecosystems in the US Great Plains, fire has not been restored as a fundamental grassland process across broad landscapes. The result has been widespread juniper encroachment and the degradation of the multiple valuable ecosystem services provided by grasslands. Here, we review the social–ecological causes and consequences of the transformation of grasslands to juniper woodlands and synthesize the recent emergence of prescribed burn cooperatives, an extensive societal movement by private citizens to restore fire to the Great Plains biome. We discuss how burn cooperatives have helped citizens overcome dominant social constraints that limit the application of prescribed fire to improve management of encroaching woody plants in grasslands. These constraints include the generally held assumptions and political impositions that all fires should be eliminated when wildfire danger increases.

Rapid changes in wildfire patterns are documented globally, increasing pressure to identify regions that may experience increases in wildfire in future decades. Temperate grassland and savanna biomes were some of the most frequently burned regions on Earth; however, large wildfires have been largely absent from the Great Plains of North America over the last century. In this paper, we conduct an in‐depth analysis of changes in large wildfire (>400 ha) regime characteristics over a 30 year period across the Great Plains. For the entire biome, (i) the average number of large wildfires increased from 33.4 ± 5.6 per year from 1985 to 1994 to 116.8 ± 28.8 wildfires per year from 2005 to 2014, (ii) total area burned by large wildfires increased 400%, (iii) over half the ecoregions had greater than a 70% probability of a large wildfire occurring in the last decade, and (iv) seasonality of large wildfires remained relatively similar.

1. Management intervention in ecosystems with degraded environmental services requires innovative resource management strategies that go beyond conventional restoration and conservation practices. We established a unique study that experimentally targeted extreme fire conditions during drought in humid subtropical and semi-arid ecoregions. 2. In the southern Great Plains of North America, conventional restoration and conservation practices have been either historically ineffective or economically cost-prohibitive at restoring grass-dominated ecosystems following conversion to resprouting shrublands. Our aim was to assess the potential for extreme fire during drought to force the system along an alternate ecological trajectory from its current progression towards closed-canopy resprouting shrubland, something that conventional fire prescriptions have been unable to accomplish. 3. We first tested the potential for high-intensity fires exhibiting extreme behaviour to disrupt the progression from grassland to shrubland. In both ecoregions, significant levels of mortality were observed for mature woody resprouters. As a result, densities were either maintained or reduced 3 years following extreme fire treatments, whereas resprouter densities continued to increase in areas that were not burned. 4. A second interventionist approach involving extreme fire and herbicide treatment combinations was not supported. Interactions between prescribed extreme fire and herbicide did not significantly reduce resprouter densities more than using herbicide alone at either site. 5. Synthesis and applications. Extreme fires during drought resulted in exceptionally high levels of mortality across all sizes of woody resprouters and limited recruitment, resulting in 35-55% lower densities of resprouters than in areas not burned. These findings counter prevailing scientific and management expectations, which are based largely on studies that impose tight controls over prescribed fire conditions and avoid extreme fire behaviour. Future interventions for controlling woody resprouters with fire may require rethinking the present ideology that extreme fire behaviour has no place in modern social-ecological landscapes.

Understanding the adaptive capacity of ecosystems to cope with change is crucial to management. However, unclear and often confusing definitions of adaptive capacity make application of this concept difficult. In this paper, we revisit definitions of adaptive capacity and operationalize the concept. We define adaptive capacity as the latent potential of an ecosystem to alter resilience in response to change. We present testable hypotheses to evaluate complementary attributes of adaptive capacity that may help further clarify the components and relevance of the concept. Adaptive sampling, inference and modeling can reduce key uncertainties incrementally over time and increase learning about adaptive capacity. Such improvements are needed because uncertainty about global change and its effect on the capacity of ecosystems to adapt to social and ecological change is high.

"Droughtinduced woody plant mortality in an encroached semi-arid savanna depends on topoedaphic factors and land management" (2014).