Tools and Techniques

Biogeochemical cycles impart significant control on ecosystem structure, function, and ecosystem services, such as nutrient sequestration, transformation, long-term storage, mitigation of water quality concerns, and carbon fixation/mineralization processes that support local food webs.

The distribution of species across the landscape is of great interest to biologists, owing to a critical need to understand the connectivity of disparate habitats for species that undertake broadscale movements. Indeed, habitat quality and quantity are thought to be important drivers of occurrence and distribution, and numerous studies have demonstrated fitness-related consequences as evidenced in...

FORT scientists study interactions among river flow, riparian vegetation and channel change at low elevations across the western United States. Cooperators include the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Reclamation. Research areas include reservoir management, control of invasive species, drought response and flood erosion after fires...

Environmental stressors that impact habitat and wildlife species include: abiotic factors (for example, land use, temperature); soil, air, and water quality (for example, eutrophication, contaminants); and disturbance (for example, fire, drought, hurricanes, species invasions). Understanding how these stressors impact ecosystems is critical to conservation and management.

INHABIT is a desktop-optimized web application and decision support tool with mapped and tabular summaries of habitat suitability models for over two hundred fifty terrestrial invasive plant species of management concern across the contiguous United States. It is the product of a scientist-practitioner partnership and is designed to facilitate enhanced invasive species management actions...

The Greater Sage-grouse Population Monitoring Framework fills a prominent information gap to aid current assessments of sage-grouse population trends across spatial and temporal scales. It centers on four objectives: 1) create a standardized database of lek counts; 2) cluster leks to develop spatial population structures; 3) estimate spatial trends across temporal extents; and 4) develop a system...

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.

Sagebrush ecosystems represent one of the most imperiled systems in North America and face continued and widespread degradation due to multiple factors including invasive species and increased human development. Effective sagebrush management must consider how to best conserve and restore habitats to stem the decline of species that rely on them, especially given limited conservation resources. To...

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...

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...