I want to show you a burned area. This is a good segue into the next component, the reclamation study, because this slide actually was taken in the first reclamation study I undertook with my colleague, who is still a collaborator with me, Larry St. Clair. This is an area in Central Utah. It's a place called Mills. Nobody has ever heard of it. I've never been to Mills. It's out in the middle of nowhere in Utah. This slide shows a greasewood community. This is the way it looked before it burned. After it burned, all the shrubs were gone. All the grasses were gone. It was just a big open field. The Bureau of Land Management really wanted to restore this area because it's prime grazing land. It gets enough water that they use the land for quality winter range. So after it burned they flew over with airplanes and dropped grass seed -- that's what cows like to eat -- and you can see the grasses seemed to do quite well, but there's a lot of spaces in between those grasses. As it turns out, we started getting major erosion events there, big blowouts where the soil would start to erode because of the wind. The growing erosional area would overtake the vascular plants until you ended up with large degraded areas. The BLM was very interested in seeing if we could do some sort of reclamation.

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