This presentation aired as part of the Great Basin LCC webinar series on November 1, 2017. The presentation was given by Dr. Jim Sedinger and Phillip Street of University of Nevada Reno and Shawn Espinosa of the Nevada Department of Wildlife.
Description: This project uses management-related variation in grazing by both feral horses and livestock as well as five years of field work to assess how both Greater Sage-grouse and the habitats on which they depend might be influenced by grazing. The research team monitored radio-tagged sage-grouse and vegetation on Hart Mountain and Sheldon National Wildlife Refuges as well as lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) south and west of Sheldon from 2013-2016. The team also worked on the latter two units in 2017. These units provide historical and current variation in grazing management: livestock were removed from Hart Mountain and Sheldon in the early 1990s; feral horses subsequently invaded Sheldon during the 2000s; additionally, BLM lands include both Horse Management Areas and grazing allotments, while the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) removed virtually all horses from Sheldon in the falls of 2014 and 2015. The team used distance sampling of horse and cow feces to estimate horse and cow use days on Sheldon and BLM land each year, and supplemented these data with data from grazing allotments and a regional horse survey conducted by USFWS to build spatial models of horse and cow use throughout the study area. They then used predicted horse and cow use, along with other environmental variables, to assess impacts on sage-grouse demographics and their habitats.
The research team includes James S. Sedinger, Tessa L. Behnke, Levi Jaster and Phillip A. Street from the University of Nevada Reno.
