Evaluation of 20 years of vegetation change in the Big Meadows landscape of Shenandoah National Park in response to mowing and burning: Application of historic data to identify best practices for future meadow management
Coscia JT , Cass WB, Reid JL. 2025. Evaluation of 20 years of vegetation change in the Big Meadows landscape of Shenandoah National Park in response to mowing and burning: Application of historic data to identify best practices for future meadow management. Science Report. NPS/SR—2025/303. National Park Service. Fort Collins, Colorado. https://doi.org/10.36967/2312599
The Big Meadows landscape is an open habitat that supports unique biodiversity not found elsewhere in Shenandoah National Park. To support this biodiversity and to maintain the Meadow’s historic landscape characteristics, Park staff have managed the meadows using prescribed burns, mowing, and the targeted cutting and removal of woody plants since 1998. To assess the impacts of these management actions on the plant community in Big Meadows and to guide future land management recommendations, we visualized changes in the plant community composition between 1998 and 2022 using non-metric multidimensional scaling and used generalized linear mixed-effects regression to model the impacts of climate and land management actions on eight plant community composition variables. Ordination revealed that the plant community across Big Meadows has moved in the direction of undesired increases in Rubus and Celastrus presence between 2004 and 2022 (stress = 0.13, non-metric R2 = 0.98, linear R2 = 0.91), a direction correlated with longer intervals between prescribed burns (R2 = 0.36, P = 0.01). Our models suggest that changes in the plant community were correlated with both changes in climate and changes in management frequency, providing strong evidence that longer intervals between prescribed burns were associated with undesired increases in woody plant cover (estimate ± SE = 0.19 ± 0.06, P < 0.001) and decreases in desired forb cover (estimate ± SE = −0.20 ± 0.04, P < 0.001 and moderate evidence that later spring freezes were associated with increases in desired graminoid cover (estimate ± SE = 0.11 ± 0.04, P = 0.01) and decreases in undesired Celastrus cover (estimate ± SE = −1.02 ± 0.48 , P = 0.04). Overall, though targeted experimentation will be needed to identify a management interval that balances the costs and effects of changes in management frequencies, our results suggest that increases in the frequency of prescribed burns and other management actions may assist in the maintenance of desired landscape conditions in Big Meadows.
- Type
- Published Report
- Authors
- Coscia, Jordan; Cass, Wendy; Reid, J.
- Date of Issue
- 2025-05
- Publisher
- National Park Service
- DOI
- 10.36967/2312599
- Units
- NRSS , SHEN
- Keywords
- generalized linear mixed modeling, Grassland management, prescribed fire, woody encroachment