PENDLETON — About two dozen Eastern Oregon residents joined the Eastern Oregon Climate Change Coalition (EOC3) for its first-ever virtual meeting on Tuesday, July 21.

The meeting, which was held over the video conference platform Zoom, centered around a presentation from Becky Kerns on invasive grass species in Eastern Oregon and the potential tradeoffs associated with those species and prescribed burning in a changing climate.

“I think a lot of forest folks are thinking about grass invasion as a biodiversity or wildlife issue, not a fuel issue,” said Kerns, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service based in Corvallis.

Kerns summarized the expected impacts of climate change on the Eastern Oregon environment — warming temperatures, longer growing seasons, reduced snowpack, milder winters and a possible increase in average annual precipitation that’s unlikely to include increased precipitation during the summer.

“This could initially increase forest productivity, especially in colder forests,” she said. “But as that happens we’re also going to be seeing an increase in wildfire and other types of disturbances on the landscape that may catalyze changes in vegetation.”

Many higher-elevation species of vegetation will struggle to adapt to these changes, Kerns said, while others, such as invasive grass species, will be more tolerant of these wildfires and other disturbances.

Kerns has spent more than 20 years researching dry forests, including a study over a decade long that looked at the relationship of wildfires and invasive grass growth at the Malheur National Forest in the southern region of the Blue Mountains.

The study looked at the impact of different burning practices and included a control area with no wildfires with variables of planned burns five and 15 years apart during either the fall or the spring.

After 2009, Kerns said the study revealed an increase to some “alarming levels” of cheatgrass, an invasive species native to Europe, northern Africa and southwestern Asia, in the five- and 15-year cycle of burns in the fall, and during the five-year cycle in the spring.

“This is one of the unintended consequences that I’m talking about,” she said. “We’re potentially facilitating grass invasion by this burning.”

That can be problematic when the cheatgrass overtakes areas previously covered in bunchgrass as potential fuel, which Kerns said often has more space between it and is less likely to spread quickly and create large wildfires.

“When we have something like cheatgrass come in, what we find is a really continuous fuel bed,” she said. “So when we do have a fire, we see fire that spreads really quickly and can spread into adjacent forest areas, and we see a lot of bunchgrass mortality.”

Kerns added that cheatgrass and other invasive species are also more likely to become wildfires in the first place.

“If you have an ignition in an invaded shrubland or an invaded grassland, you are almost certain to have a fire,” she said. “So this can also impact your fire frequency.”

Kerns is continuing to work on communicating these potential tradeoffs, and is currently working on additional studies in Eastern Oregon focused on the spread of another invasive grass species known as Ventenata dubia.

While it was the climate coalition’s first virtual meeting, EOC3 is planning on hosting more virtual meetings over Zoom in the coming months.