The DOI matches its Crossref record; 13 of the 13 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Invasive grasses increase fire occurrence and frequency across US ecoregions
Open accessAbstract
Fire-prone invasive grasses create novel ecosystem threats by increasing fine-fuel loads and continuity, which can alter fire regimes. While the existence of an invasive grass-fire cycle is well known, evidence of altered fire regimes is typically based on local-scale studies or expert knowledge. Here, we quantify the effects of 12 nonnative, invasive grasses on fire occurrence, size, and frequency across 29 US ecoregions encompassing more than one third of the conterminous United States. These 12 grass species promote fire locally and have extensive spatial records of abundant infestations. We combined agency and satellite fire data with records of abundant grass invasion to test for differences in fire regimes between invaded and nearby “uninvaded” habitat. Additionally, we assessed whether invasive grass presence is a significant predictor of altered fire by modeling fire occurrence, size, and frequency as a function of grass invasion, in addition to anthropogenic and ecological covariates relevant to fire. Eight species showed significantly higher fire-occurrence rates, which more than tripled for Schismus barbatus and Pennisetum ciliare. Six species demonstrated significantly higher mean fire frequency, which more than doubled for Neyraudia reynaudiana and Pennisetum ciliare . Grass invasion was significant in fire occurrence and frequency models, but not in fire-size models. The significant differences in fire regimes, coupled with the importance of grass invasion in modeling these differences, suggest that invasive grasses alter US fire regimes at regional scales. As concern about US wildfires grows, accounting for fire-promoting invasive grasses will be imperative for effectively managing ecosystems.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Model selection and multimodel inference: a practical information-theoretic approach.
Guthery, F. S., Burnham, K. P., & Anderson, D. R. (2003) · The Journal of Wildlife Management · doi:10.2307/3802723 · Cited by 41,495
Warming and earlier spring increase western U.S. forest wildfire activity.
Westerling, A. L., Hidalgo, H. G., Cayan, D. R., & Swetnam, T. W. (2006) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1128834 · Cited by 5,176 · cited 1×
“Wildfires are costly both ecologically and economically (23, 24), and climate change and human ignition sources have contributed to a regional-scale increase in the United States for both wildfire occurrence and the number of large wildfires (7, 9, 44, 51).”
BackgroundBiological Invasions by Exotic Grasses, the Grass/Fire Cycle, and Global Change
D'Antonio, C. M., & Vitousek, P. M. (1992) · Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics · doi:10.1146/annurev.es.23.110192.000431 · Cited by 3,399
Bowman, D. M. J. S., Balch, J. K., Artaxo, P., Bond, W. J., Carlson, J. M., Cochrane, M. A., D’Antonio, C. M., DeFries, R. S., Doyle, J. C., Harrison, S. P., et al. (2009) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1163886 · Cited by 3,351
Self-citationEffects of Invasive Alien Plants on Fire Regimes
BROOKS, M. L., D'ANTONIO, C. M., RICHARDSON, D. M., GRACE, J. B., KEELEY, J. E., DiTOMASO, J. M., HOBBS, R. J., PELLANT, M., & PYKE, D. (2004) · BioScience · doi:10.1641/0006-3568(2004)054[0677:eoiapo]2.0.co;2 · Cited by 1,634
Implications of changing climate for global wildland fire
Flannigan, M. D., Krawchuk, M. A., de Groot, W. J., Wotton, B. M., & Gowman, L. M. (2009) · International Journal of Wildland Fire · doi:10.1071/wf08187 · Cited by 1,460
A Project for Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity
Eidenshink, J., Schwind, B., Brewer, K., Zhu, Z.-L., Quayle, B., & Howard, S. (2007) · Fire Ecology · doi:10.4996/fireecology.0301003 · Cited by 1,423
The human dimension of fire regimes on Earth
Bowman, D. M. J. S., Balch, J., Artaxo, P., Bond, W. J., Cochrane, M. A., D’Antonio, C. M., DeFries, R., Johnston, F. H., Keeley, J. E., Krawchuk, M. A., et al. (2011) · Journal of Biogeography · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2699.2011.02595.x · Cited by 1,230
Self-citationHuman-started wildfires expand the fire niche across the United States
Balch, J. K., Bradley, B. A., Abatzoglou, J. T., Nagy, R. C., Fusco, E. J., & Mahood, A. L. (2017) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1617394114 · Cited by 1,043
Self-citationIntroduced annual grass increases regional fire activity across the arid western USA(1980–2009)
Balch, J. K., Bradley, B. A., D'Antonio, C. M., & Gómez‐Dans, J. (2013) · Global Change Biology · doi:10.1111/gcb.12046 · Cited by 682
Self-citation
Cited by
Fire and biodiversity in the Anthropocene
Kelly, L. T., Giljohann, K. M., Duane, A., Aquilué, N., Archibald, S., Batllori, E., Bennett, A. F., Buckland, S. T., Canelles, Q., Clarke, M. F., et al. (2020) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.abb0355 · Cited by 709
U.S. fires became larger, more frequent, and more widespread in the 2000s
Iglesias, V., Balch, J. K., & Travis, W. R. (2022) · Science Advances · doi:10.1126/sciadv.abc0020 · Cited by 280
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Fusco, E. J., Finn, J. T., Balch, J. K., Nagy, R. C., & Bradley, B. A.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2019-11-04
- Volume
- 116
- Issue
- 47
- Pages
- 23594-23599
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- OpenAlex
- W2988248899
- Cited by
- 270
- References
- 13
- FWCI
- 12.80
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Invasive grasses increase fire occurrence and frequency across US ecoregions. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1073/pnas.1908253116
- The paper
- Fusco, E. J., Finn, J. T., Balch, J. K., Nagy, R. C., & Bradley, B. A. (2019). Invasive grasses increase fire occurrence and frequency across US ecoregions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1908253116
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
