Filters: Contacts: Steven T Knick (X)
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The delineation of priority areas in western North America for managing Greater Sage-Grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) represents a broad-scale experiment in conservation biology. The strategy of limiting spatial disturbance and focusing conservation actions within delineated areas may benefit the greatest proportion of Greater Sage-Grouse. However, land use under normal restrictions outside priority areas potentially limits dispersal and gene flow, which can isolate priority areas and lead to spatially disjunct populations. We used graph theory, representing priority areas as spatially distributed nodes interconnected by movement corridors, to understand the capacity of priority areas to function as connected...
Greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) is a candidate for listing under the Endangered Species Act because of population and habitat fragmentation coupled with inadequate regulatory mechanisms to control development in critical areas. In addition to the current threats to habitat, each 1 degree celsius increase due to climate change is expected to result in an additional 87,000 km2 of sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) that will be converted to unsuitable habitat for sage-grouse. Thus, the future distribution and composition of sagebrush landscapes is likely to differ greatly from today’s configuration. We conducted a large, multi-objective project to identify: (1) characteristics of habitats required by sage-grouse,...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation;
Tags: Birds,
Centrocercus urophasianus,
Endangered Species Act,
Grasslands and Plains,
Greater Sage-Grouse,
Proposed work will monitor for five years vegetation, fuels, wildlife, insects, and weather at 10 SageSTEP sites, all of which have been treated to reduce either juniper encroachment (woodland sites) or cheatgrass invasion (sagebrush/cheatgrass sites). Each of the six woodland sites contains an untreated control plot, a ‘cut’ plot where all trees were felled and left on site, and a prescribed burn plot, where fire was used to kill all trees – management objective of the treatments was to reduce tree dominance. Each of the four sagebrush/cheatgrass sites contains an untreated control plot, a mowed plot, a prescribed burn plot, and an herbicide plot, where each treatment was designed to remove 50% of the sagebrush...
This Restoration Handbook consists of three parts with the same main title, “Restoration Handbook for Sagebrush Steppe Ecosystems with Emphasis on Greater Sage-Grouse Habitat.” These parts provide an approach for effective implementation of restoration practices in sagebrush steppe ecosystems. The current document summarizes the literature and synthesizes core concepts that are necessary for a practitioner/manager to apply tools to help make landscape and site-specific decisions. Landscape-level decision tools are designed to help managers prioritize resource allocation among multiple potential restoration projects for achieving the greatest benefit at the landscape level. We are examining how restoration of sagebrush...
The ecological integrity of Sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) ecosystems in the Intermountain West (U.S.A.) has been diminished by synergistic relationships among human activities, spread of invasive plants, and altered disturbance regimes. An aggressive effort to restore Sagebrush habitats is necessary if we are to stabilize or improve current habitat trajectories and reverse declining population trends of dependent wildlife. Existing economic resources, technical impediments, and logistic difficulties limit our efforts to a fraction of the extensive area undergoing fragmentation, degradation, and loss. We prioritized landscapes for restoring Sagebrush habitats within the intermountain western region of the United States...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation,
Journal Citation;
Tags: Artemisia,
Cheatgrass,
Greater Sage-Grouse,
Intermountain West,
Restoration Ecology,
Degradation, fragmentation, and loss of native sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) landscapes have imperiled these habitats and their associated avifauna. Historically, this vast piece of the Western landscape has been undervalued: even though more than 70% of all remaining sagebrush habitat in the United States is publicly owned, <3% of it is protected as federal reserves or national parks. We review the threats facing birds in sagebrush habitats to emphasize the urgency for conservation and research actions, and synthesize existing information that forms the foundation for recommended research directions. Management and conservation of birds in sagebrush habitats will require more research into four major topics: (1) identification...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation,
Journal Citation;
Tags: Artemisia,
Cooper Ornithological Society,
The Condor,
WLCI Related Publication,
conservation,
We partitioned a Mahalanobis D2 model of sage-grouse habitat use into separate additive components each representing independent combinations of species-habitat relationships to identify and map range-wide ecological minimums for sage-grouse. We assumed the states delineations of priority areas capture higher quality habitat and larger numbers of sage-grouse populations across our study area. We randomly selected 1669 points from the priority areas and corresponding variables GIS datasets to calibrate models. We estimated distributions of our variables from 1000 iterative samples created by bootstrapping the calibration data. To better incorporate conditions in both large and small priority areas, we restricted...
Greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) is a candidate for listing under the Endangered Species Act because of population and habitat fragmentation combined with inadequate regulatory mechanisms to control development in critical areas. In addition to the current threats to habitat, each 1 degree celsius increase in temperature due to climate change is expected to result in an additional 87,000 km2 of sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) that will be converted to unsuitable habitat for sage-grouse. Thus, the future distribution and composition of sagebrush landscapes is likely to differ greatly from today’s configuration. We conducted a large, multi-objective project to identify: (1) characteristics of habitats required...
Categories: Project;
Types: Map Service,
OGC WFS Layer,
OGC WMS Layer,
OGC WMS Service;
Tags: 2011,
Birds,
Birds,
CASC,
Climate Change,
Greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) once occupied parts of 12 states within the western United States and 3 Canadian provinces. Populations of greater sage-grouse have undergone long-term population declines. The sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) habitats on which sage-grouse depend have experienced extensive alteration and loss. Consequently, concerns raised for the conservation and management of greater sage-grouse and their habitats have resulted in petitions to list greater sage-grouse under the Endangered Species Act. In this report, we assessed the ecological status and potential factors that influenced greater sage-grouse and sagebrush habitats across their entire distribution. We used a large-scale...
Categories: Publication;
Tags: WLCI Related Publication
Circuitscape software (v4.0, www.circuitscape.org) was applied to a range-wide habitat similarity index map for sage-grouse to model pathways between all priority areas of conservation network. We assumed that individual sage-grouse would move more easily through areas meeting their habitat requirements and used a scaled inverse of our mapped habitat scores as resistance to sage-grouse movements among the priority areas. Resistance values ranged from 1 representing the lowest resistance/highest habitat value to 100 (high resistance/lowest habitat value). Circuitscape (McRae et al. 2008) was run using the pairwise mode to calculate connectivity between all pairs of priority areas. Priority areas were treated as focal...
Habitat and population fragmentation were among the primary factors contributing to the recent U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decision that listing greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus, hereafter sage-grouse) was warranted but currently precluded by higher priority actions. Increasingly, current management is focused on core or priority areas containing the highest densities of breeding birds with little regard to understanding connectivity within and among areas. The most fundamental objective of species conservation is to first identify and subsequently maintain a set of viable and connected populations. Therefore, if management emphasis on core areas is to be successful for long-term conservation, it...
Categories: Publication;
Types: Citation;
Tags: Birds,
Corridors,
Grasslands and Plains,
Greater Sage-Grouse,
Landscapes,
Sagebrush (Artemisia spp.)-dominated shrublands are one of the most widespread ecosystems in western North America but also among the most imperiled due to interactions among land use, fire, and exotic plants. Global climate change models predict an accelerated loss of sagebrush due to synergistic feedbacks among disturbance patterns and vegetation response; only 20% would remain under the most extreme scenario of >6° C increase by the end of this century (Fig. 1). Much of the current sagebrush distribution within the Great Northern Landscape Conservation Cooperative (GNLCC) would be lost. The conservation status of Greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus), the most visible of >350 plant and wildlife species...
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