What once would have been a new beginning for native plants and animals is now under the influence of the livestock industry's self-interested objective to maximize forage and the weed seed we have yet to effectively mitigate. With the native vegetation wiped out of areas following fire, critical decisions are made about the constitution of plant communities and seed that is to be spread with agency renabilitation efforts.
Two objectives compete - to restore the native balance of plant communities that have been fire ravaged by utilizing native species seed and give the land the adequate time to refortify robust native populations and soil crusts? Or to use the opportunity of this new blank palette to mazimize utilization by reseeding with non-native plants that provide more productive forage for cattle?
Every so often public lands management agencies such as BLM make the wise decision to reseed with natives. But spreading native seed across burns can only help the condition of the land when given the time to mature into established communities. Generally, BLM is unable or unwilling to hold against the pressures of the livestock industry before buckling and letting out stock after a woefully inadequate couple of years. The result is disturbance of tentative soils and natives. Immature, tender yearlings are quickly munched and the coarse, unappealing weeds reclaim their advantage.
Other examples of rehab include the introduction of Crested wheat grass, a non-native plant, that has courted the appeal of grazers as a result of its higher yeilds which support higher stocking rates of cattle on your public land. As a front, BLM has celebrated the plant's alleged fire resistance given the wide interspaces between individual plants. As you can see, disturbances leave CWG's interspaces choked with cheat. Unfortunately, cattle's distaste for CWG is only slightly less than that of cheatgrass itself - leaving the natives munched first. But BLM's stocking rates are determined on biomass, not on bovines' selective palette and what's left of these foreign species once cattle have exhausted tasty natives is inflated fuel levels that will propel hot and fast moving range-fire.