Land Management

Federal agencies manage wildland fire in many ways, including broad-scale fire management planning and site-specific fire and fuels management actions. Federal policy requires agencies to use science in fire management planning and environmental effects analyses. However, fire managers have limited time to compile and synthesize science. The USGS is collaborating with fire management staff across...

USGS researchers are using remote-sensing and other broadscale datasets to study and predict recovery of sagebrush across the sage-grouse range, assessing influence of disturbance, restoration treatments, soil moisture, and other ecological conditions on trends in sagebrush cover. The results will be used to inform conservation prioritization models, economic analyses, projections of future...

Public lands provide important habitat for many rare plants. However, public lands often need to accommodate many other uses, including traditional and renewable energy development, in addition to conservation. We are working with the Bureau of Land Management to coproduce ensemble habitat suitability models that can inform agency planning and permitting decisions that may impact rare plants.

In partnership with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, and other partners, scientists from USGS Fort Collins Science Center are working to create a suite of prioritization scenarios that will inform adaptive management for Gunnison sage-grouse.

As part of a broader USGS project on Post-fire Hazards and Impacts to Resources and Ecosystems (PHIRE): Support for Response, Recovery, and Mitigation, the PHIRE social science team convenes stakeholders involved in post-fire hazard science and decision-making to identify potential consequences resulting from post-fire hazard scenarios along with strategies to reduce the likelihood or severity of...

Within areas of overlapping sagebrush and pinyon-juniper ecosystems, wildlife populations are declining due to habitat fragmentation and degradation, changing environments, and human development. However, management to bolster species associated with one ecosystem may result in negative consequences for species associated with the other. Thus, land managers are challenged with balancing which...

Climate change will expose many species to novel extreme environmental conditions, that may test organisms’ ability to respond to environmental change. Local adaptation, when a species evolves to be more suited for its local environment, can be an indicator of whether a species is likely to persist in the rapidly changing environment. Habitat specialists, like the greater sage-grouse, have evolved...

Widespread anthropogenic development in the sagebrush steppe and shifting drought and wildfire patterns have contributed to the observed dramatic declines of the greater sage-grouse since the 1960s. Alteration of the sagebrush habitat can affect many aspects of the species life history, including survival and local resource use. Over many years, the combined effects of landscape composition on...

The greater sage-grouse is a sagebrush-obligate species that has experienced dramatic range-wide declines since the 1960s, causing significant conservation concern. Genetic information has refined our understanding of population structure, the levels of inbreeding or relatedness, allowed the ability to monitor for change over time, and has been used to understand the outcome of management actions...

Many revegetation projects are intended to benefit focal wildlife species. Yet, few scope the ability of revegetation efforts to yield habitat. To investigate the ability of alternative sagebrush planting strategies to recover habitat conditions for wildlife like sage-grouse,  USGS and Colorado State University scientists developed a spatial vegetation-habitat recovery model. Scientists combined...

Arid shrublands of western North America face growing threats from disturbances such as wildfire, drought, and invasive species. These threats are increasingly altering the sagebrush ( Artemisia species) biome and degrading habitat for species of conservation concern such as greater sage-grouse ( Centrocercus urophasianus). Effective management and restoration are needed to slow or reverse these...

The use of rare plant habitat models in land management decisions can be constrained by issues surrounding data access, model quality, and institutional capacity, among other factors. This project seeks to understand challenges associated with using habitat models and explore avenues for addressing these challenges to facilitate greater use of habitat models in public lands decision making.