From APWG List

Invasive weed a fuel for West's wildfires

By Patrick O'Driscoll, USA TODAY
DENVER â€" Cheatgrass, a wispy Eurasian weed accidentally brought to the
USA in the late 19th century, has become a 21st century headache
across the West, fueling some of this summer's most destructive wildfires.

The largest blaze in Utah history, the 567-square-mile Milford Flat
fire last month, raced across rangeland infested with the highly
combustible, straw-colored plant. Bone-dry expanses of cheatgrass in
Idaho and Nevada also stoked the 1,020-square-mile Murphy Complex
fires, the largest to burn in Idaho in 97 years.

The federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) estimates 2 million acres
have burned in the Great Basin, the West's expanse of sagebrush
steppes vulnerable to cheatgrass fires.

The governors of Idaho, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming formally declared war
this month on the invader, which now dominates between 25 million and
100 million acres of sagebrush in the Great Basin. They pledged
cooperation in replanting charred areas before the weed can take root
again. The BLM estimates cheatgrass invades 4,000 acres of new terrain
a day.

"It's exploding on us," says ecologist Mike Pellant, head of the
agency's Great Basin Restoration Initiative, which does research and
rehabilitation. "We've been at war with cheatgrass for years now. It's
like the Dutch boy with the finger in the dike. You work hard in an
area and make progress, and then somewhere else, (fire) happens all
over again."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/environment/2007-08-29-cheatgrass_N.htm