Understanding Local Resistance and Resilience to Future Habitat Change in the Sagebrush Ecosystem

Principal Investigator

Daniel Manier

Start Date

2019-07-12

End Date

2021-10-11

Release Date

2019

The sagebrush ecosystem is home to diverse wildlife, including big-game and Greater sage-grouse. Historic and contemporary land-uses, large wildfires, exotic plant invasion and woodland expansion characterize widespread threats to this multiple-use landscape and create management challenges. Efforts of federal and state agencies and private landowners across the biome are focused on restoration and maintenance of conditions that support wildlife, livestock, energy development and many other uses. However, this semi-arid landscape presents challenges for management due to highly variable patterns in growing conditions leading to differences in plant composition, fuel accumulation and vegetation recovery. Much of this variability is created by soil and climate conditions. Recent work by multiple agencies and scientists defined relationships between soil and climate that characterize ecosystem recovery and resistance to degradation. These relations have important implications for management treatment outcomes, fuel profiles and fire risk, post-fire recovery and noxious weed invasions. Modern data and modeling applications focused on the soil environment can improve our ability to map variations in growing conditions. Instead of broadly classified climate regions, we model a continuous surface of grid cells using the soil and climate conditions unique to each location. The result is a spatially explicit simulation of evapotranspiration rates and soil moisture budgets across a large and variable landscape. This allows classification of each location according to traditional taxonomy and refined recognition of important variability of the soil-climate within those classes. Importantly, because this approach uses climate inputs, it can be informed by climate model scenarios to assess implications for habitat conditions, restoration outcomes and fuel profiles. Model results can guide understanding of ecosystem patterns and management of the habitat, and substitution of climate scenarios enables assessment of potential risks to habitat conditions and management actions due to climate variability across the western United States.

ScienceBase WMS

• National and Regional Climate Adaptation Science Centers
• North Central CASC