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Person

K. Ben Gustafson


Email: kgustafson@usgs.gov
Office Phone: 530-669-5069
ORCID: 0000-0003-3530-0372

Location
800 Business Park Drive
Dixon , CA 95620
US
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Sage-grouse habitat areas divided into proposed management categories within Nevada and California project study boundaries. HABITAT CATEGORY DETERMINATION The process for category determination was directed by the Nevada Sagebrush Ecosystem Technical team. Sage-grouse habitat was determined from a statewide resource selection function model and first categorized into 4 classes: high, moderate, low, and non-habitat. The standard deviations (SD) from a normal distribution of RSF values created from a set of validation points (10% of the entire telemetry dataset) were used to categorize habitat ‘quality’ classes. 1) High quality habitat comprised pixels with RSF values < 0.5 SD. 2) Moderate > 0.5 and < 1.0 SD. 3)...
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Integrating Spatially Explicit Indices of Abundance and Habitat Quality: An Applied Example for Greater Sage-grouse Management
This USGS data release represents geospatial data for the sage-grouse habitat mapping project. This study provides timely and highly useful information about greater sage-grouse over a large area of the Great Basin. USGS researchers and their colleagues created a template for combining landscape-scale occurrence or abundance data with habitat selection data in order to identify areas most critical to sustaining populations of species of conservation concern. The template also identifies those areas where land use changes have minimal impact. To inform greater sage-grouse conservation planning, the researchers developed greater sage-grouse habitat management categories based on habitat selection indices (HSI) and...
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Spatial associations between marked sage-grouse and existing PMU boundaries were used as an initial starting point for delineating subregions for habitat selection analyses and naming conventions across Nevada and northeastern California. Ultimately, the data were partitioned into 19 subregions based on movement patterns of individual radio-marked sage-grouse for habitat analyses, with each grouse occupying one subregion only. Some subregions contained too few marked sage-grouse for sufficient training data to develop a habitat model, which resulted in the exclusion of seven subregions with fewer than 20 marked sage-grouse or less than 100 telemetry locations. However, data from these excluded ‘non-RSF’ subregions...
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SPACE USE INDEX CALCULATION Lek coordinates and associated trend count data were obtained from the 2013 Nevada Sage-grouse Lek Database compiled by the Nevada Department of Wildlife (NDOW, S. Espinosa, 9/10/2013). We queried the database for leks with a ‘LEKSTATUS’ field classified as ‘Active’ or ‘Pending’. Active leks comprised leks with breeding males observed within the last 5 years. Pending leks comprised leks without consistent breeding activity during the prior 3 – 5 surveys or had not been surveyed during the past 5 years; these leks typically trended towards ‘inactive’. A sage-grouse management area (SGMA) was calculated by buffering Population Management Units developed by NDOW by 10km. This included leks...
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Beschta and Ripple (2012) assert that increased elk populations in the Olympic National Park due to extirpation of wolves in the 1920’s has led to a reduction in riparian vegetation. They hypothesize that a decrease in this vegetation has led to an increase in erosion and undercutting of large conifer trees along the river banks, causing woody debris in the river, which in turn impacts channel morphology. Using imagery dating from 1939 and a set of digitized channel margins for each year, we classified vegetation changes that have occurred along the Hoh, Queets, and Quinault Rivers. We focused on identifying large conifers near the river that could impact water flow and channel morphology if undercut and classified...
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