Edward C. Rhodes

• MS
• Research Specialist III at Texas A&M University

We evaluated 6 years of vegetation response following prescribed fire in Wyoming big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata spp. wyomingensis) steppe on vegetation cover, productivity, and nutritional quality of forbs preferred by greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus), and abundance of common arthropod orders. Habitat cover (shrubs and tall herb...

Woody plant encroachment into rangeland ecosystems is a widespread and often unwelcomed circumstance affecting rangeland management decisions worldwide. In the rangeland management profession, varying philosophies have been employed in the management of woody plant encroachment. Following World War II, total eradication of woody plant cover was com...

Both grazing and fine fuels management are dependent on the temporal and spatial distribution of herbaceous biomass production. Rangeland and wildland fire managers can both benefit from knowing when and where there is excessive herbaceous biomass buildup. In this study, we compared modeled herbaceous biomass outputs from the Phytomass Growth Simul...

The Ogallala Aquifer region, located in the Great Plains of the central United States, is the largest freshwater aquifer in North America, supporting one of the most agriculturally productive regions in the world. In this paper, we discuss the history of settlement and water use in this region, from the Homestead Act and the Dust Bowl to modern irr...

Landowners and natural resource agencies are seeking to better understand the benefits of best management practices (BMPs) for addressing water quality issues. Using edge-of-field and edge-of-farm runoff analysis, we compared runoff volumes and water quality between small watersheds where BMPs (e.g., prescribed grazing, silvicultural practices) wer...

The Navasota River Basin, itself a tributary of the Brazos River in Texas, is a dynamic watershed undergoing many natural and anthropogenic changes. Local stakeholder involvement in this watershed is quite high, and many landowners in the southern portion of the watershed have concerns regarding the increasing frequency and duration of flooding on...

From 2021 to 2022, the Texas A&M Institute for a Disaster Resilient Texas conducted a year-long, multidisciplinary study to investigate potential causes of increased flooding along the Navasota River south of Lake Limestone. Guided by the interests of local stakeholders, researchers analyzed the potential impacts of the Sterling C. Robertson dam on...

Historical aerial photographs across the area of interest were ordered for 1972 (pre-dam), 1981 (post-dam), 1989/90, and 1995. In addition, modern aerial photography from the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) is available online from 2003 onwards annually with a high spatial resolution of 1 m. Tiles in the NAIP collection are natural colo...

The use of geospatial sciences and technologies for the management of grazinglands has fostered a plethora of applications related to ecology, wildlife, vegetation science, forage productivity and quality, and animal husbandry. Some of the earliest use of remote sensing dates to the proliferation of aerial photography in the 1930s. Today, remote se...

This document presents a plan to restore and protect water quality in the Big Elm Creek watershed. By approaching water quality issues at the watershed level rather than political boundaries, this plan can better identify potential water quality sources and solutions. This approach also incorporates the values, visions, and knowledge of individuals...

Historical water quality monitoring data for the Mission and Aransas rivers, located on the Texas Gulf coast, had shown that the waterbodies did not meet water quality standards for recreation due to elevated levels of Enterococci. The tidal segments of the Mission and Aransas rivers were classified as impaired beginning with the 2004 Texas Water Q...

Ashe juniper invasion is a widespread issue on Texas and Oklahoma rangelands. Increased densities of Ashe juniper trees increase the risk of wildfire and decrease herbaceous forage production. Browsing animals, such as goats, are one tool that can be used to effectively reduce juniper fuel. In order to estimate the available biomass, allometric mea...

This monitoring program’s goal is to assess water quality improvements resulting from conservation practice implementation in the Lake O’ the Pines watershed. Monitoring methods used include edge-of-field, edge-of-farm and instream sampling. Edge-of-field and edge-of-farm monitoring was implemented to quantify non-point source pollutant loading dif...

LANDSAT imagery is a freely available global dataset that is attractive for many remote sensing applications, however, the 30m resolution is not ideal for more detailed analyses such as estimating woody plant cover on a localized scale. In this study, we researched the feasibility of using 2m high resolution (HiRes) imagery to create a woody cover...

Context Woody plant encroachment—the conversion of grasslands to woodlands—is among the greatest challenges faced by rangelands worldwide. Yet this phenomenon is poorly understood, and complex land use dynamics make interpreting the timing and extent of land cover changes a global challenge. Objectives For many regions, the true degree and rate of...

Despite their size, small farm ponds are important features in many landscapes. Yet hydrographical databases often fail to capture these ponds, and their impacts on watershed processes remain unclear. For a 230-km2 portion of central Texas, United States (U.S.), we created a historical inventory of ponds and quantified the accuracy of automated det...

Burn Severity Maps, or differenced Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR) maps, categorize burned areas (soils and vegetation) into 4 levels: high, moderate, low, and unburned. These maps can be used to rapidly assess wildfire impacts across large, inaccessible landscapes, and also to support assessment of immediate impacts to soils, or short- to long-term i...

Woody plant encroachment into the grassland ecosystems of North America has been a long documented phenomenon of ecological and economical significance. Due to anthropogenic manipulation, simply monitoring percent woody cover over time does not fully show the dynamics of woody cover growth and decline. Woody plant removal on one property may be off...

Woody plant encroachment—the conversion of grasslands to woodlands—continues to transform rangelands worldwide, yet its causes and consequences remain poorly understood. Despite this being a coupled human–ecological phenomenon, research to date has tended toward ecological aspects of the issue. In this paper, we provide new insight into the long-te...

Having near-real time access to herbaceous standing fuel conditions can be a vital tool for decision making and planning for wildfire prevention, control, and mitigation. By combining field validated data with plant growth models and remote sensing technology, daily maps of fuel conditions may be generated for wildfire management. Field data were c...

While fire and rangeland managers fre-quently have different land manage-ment roles and objectives, their data needs with regards to herbaceous bio-mass (fuel loads and forage) often over-lap, and can be served with a single sampling protocol for both rangeland and fuels management. In this study, we examined how two herbaceous sam-pling methods co...

Mapping burn severity with before/after 30m LANDSAT imagery is a useful tool in characterizing large wildfires in forested areas. Post-fire imagery used in classification is usually acquired 1-2 growing seasons post-burn to allow for delayed tree mortality. While useful for measuring the loss of forested resources, how effective is this at describi...

The PHYGROW model is a daily time step phytomass growth model that predicts vegetation production and other biophysical data. To support our fire modeling efforts, a new component was added to the PHYGROW model to determine the growth stage and moisture content of live vegetation. Plant physiological indicators including growth rate, leaf turnover,...

Fort Hood, located adjacent to Killeen, Texas, was established by the United States Government in 1942 through the acquisition of private lands. Ranchers displaced by the new Army installation were allowed to maintain grazing rights on the post's rangelands, which is practiced to this day. In 2009, a study was created to summarize grazing utilizati...

The management of fine fuels in semi-arid rangelands is vital in the mitigation of wildfire risk. The condition of fine fuels can vary greatly in short order through climatic and herbivore impacts on herbaceous vegetation. The Phytomass Growth Simulator (PHYGROW) is a daily time-step, point based computation engine designed to model aboveground pla...

Rangeland communities located on Fort Hood in central Texas are under constant threat of wildfire due to military training activities. In order to help manage and mitigate losses to life and property, a Burning Risk Advisory Support System (BRASS) is being developed to help decision makers understand fire risks, and model wildfire behavior. The BRA...

Small (<40.5-ha) patch fires or mechanical manipulations to reduce big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) cover has been suggested as a management option to improve sage-grouse pre-nesting and brood rearing habitat and provide a diverse habitat mosaic. We evaluated the effects of prescribed fire and wildfire on sage-grouse habitat in three Wyoming bi...

The risk of wildfire on grasslands is directly related to the state and condition of current weather and vegetation variables within an ecosystem. The Burning Risk Advisory Support System (BRASS) is a decision support tool designed to provide land managers the ability to assess fuel and weather information in near-real time to aid in prescribed and...

The Phytomass Growth Simulator (PHYGROW) is a plant growth model developed to predict grazable forage and herbaceous fuel loads at the landscape level. In an effort to adapt the pace quadrat frequency method in use on many western National Forests, a study was begun in 2008 to compare the data collected from an "enhanced" quadrat frequency (EFM)...

Accurate prediction of wildfire behavior on rangelands is facilitated by landscape scale, real-time dynamic fuel models. The Phygrow model was developed to predict forage for herbivores at the landscape scale when used within a geographic information system. Phygrow has recently been applied to predict fuel for rangeland wildfires. The objective of...

In the summer of 2008, research was conducted to determine a suitable sampling method to meet the needs of the USFS Region 3's fire fuel landscape-level mapping project. An "enhanced" quadrat frequency (EFM) frame (comprised of three basal hit pins, a 10x10cm, and a 40x40cm frequency frame, Figure 1) was compared to a point-frequency (PF) frame (co...

Prescribed fire in rangeland ecosystems is applied for a variety of management objectives, including enhancing productivity of forage species for domestic livestock. In the big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata Nutt.) steppe of the western United States, fire has been a natural and prescribed disturbance, temporarily shifting vegetation from shrub-gr...

In the western United States, sagebrush (Artemisia spp L.) dominated rangelands are extensive, accounting for approximately 63 million ha. The Wyoming big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata Nutt. ssp. wyomingensis Beetle & Young) alliance is found in more xeric environments, occupying the largest area of the big sagebrush complex in areas within a 200...