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Shawn P Espinosa

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Ranked habitat classes for sage-grouse brood-rearing productivity at each 90 m pixel. Habitat classes represent areas where high brood selection and high brood survival intersected, whereas the lowest ranks represent areas where high brood habitat selection intersected with the low brood survival. Hierarchical models of brood selection and survival were fit to landscape covariates within a Bayesian modeling framework in Nevada and California from 2009 - 2017 to develop spatially explicit information about brood habitat selection and survival.
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We used a hierarchical Bayesian modeling framework to estimate resource selection functions and survival for early and late brood-rearing stages of sage-grouse in relation to a broad suite of habitat characteristics evaluated at multiple spatial scales within the Great Basin from 2009 to 2019. Sage-grouse selected for greater perennial grass cover, higher relative elevations, and areas closer to springs and wet meadows during both early and late brood-rearing. Terrain characteristics, including heat load and aspect, were important in survival models, as was variation in shrub height. We also found strong evidence for higher survival for both early and late broods within previously burned areas, but survival within...
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We evaluated the expected success of habitat recovery in priority areas under 3 different restoration scenarios: passive, planting, and seeding. Passive means no human intervention following a fire disturbance. Under a planting scenario, field technicians methodically plant young sagebrush saplings at the burned site. The seeding scenario involves distributing large amounts of sagebrush seeds throughout the affected area.
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We examined nest survival of Greater Sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus; hereafter, sage-grouse) in relation to fine-scale habitat patterns that influenced nest site selection, using data from nests of telemetered females at 17 sites across 6 years in Nevada and northeastern California, USA. Importantly, sites spanned mesic and xeric average precipitation conditions and concomitant vegetation community structure across cold desert ecosystems of the North American Great Basin. Vegetative cover immediately surrounding sage-grouse nests was important for both nest site selection and nest survival, but responses varied between mesic and xeric sites. For example, while taller perennial grass was selected at xeric...
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These data represent habitat selection of greater sage-grouse at the 50 day mark of their brood rearing process. Sage-grouse and their broods were monitored on their own individual time lines, so one group's 50th day may not necessarily be the same as any other bird's 50th day.
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