Economic assessment of addressing annual invasive grasses across the sagebrush biome
This interdisciplinary project combines expert judgment on treatment costs with spatially explicit ecological modeling to estimate the financial resources needed to address the threat of invasive annual grass across the entire sagebrush biome. Results of the assessment will provide economic insights that can inform cost-effective resource allocation to efficiently achieve sagebrush conservation goals.
The Sagebrush Conservation Design calls for a “Defend the Core, Grow the Core, Mitigate Impacts” approach to prioritizing conservation efforts across the sagebrush biome. Consequently, there is a critical science need for identifying costs associated with prioritizing invasive annual grass management in high-priority sagebrush core areas. This project will identify multi-year, sagebrush biome-wide costs needed to address the invasive annual grass threat spatially with a Defend and Grow the Core approach. Economists and ecologists with the USGS Fort Collins Science Center are working with an interagency expert panel to develop a cost assessment matrix, design a series of allocation management scenarios, and use bioeconomic modeling to monetize the costs for each scenario. Economic comparisons of scenarios will estimate the financial resources required to implement the Defend and Grow the Core strategy identified in the Sagebrush Conservation Design and associated ecological outcomes.
An economic assessment of invasive annual grasses will increase awareness of the resource needs and cost-effectiveness based on an evaluation of return on investment through a spatially prioritized approach for implementation. This project was requested by an interagency panel consisting of USFWS Sagebrush Ecosystem Team and BLM Division of Forestry, Range, and Vegetation Resources. Staff from the USGS Fort Collins Science Center are working on this project with an expert panel with members from BLM, USFWS, Intermountain West Joint Venture (IWJV), Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (WAFWA), and others. BLM, USFWS, USGS, and other partners will coproduce this project with a goal of producing practical, actionable science that informs planning, policy, and management decisions on public lands. This information will inform programmatic implementation of invasive annual grass management and the prioritization of proactive conservation in invasive annual grass management.
