Current and projected sagebrush ecological integrity across the Western U.S., 2017-2100

Understanding how climate change will contribute to ongoing declines in sagebrush ecological integrity is critical for informing natural resource management. We assessed potential future changes in sagebrush ecological integrity under a range of scenarios using an individual plant-based simulation model, integrated with remotely sensed estimates of current sagebrush ecological integrity. The simulation model allowed us to estimate how climate change, wildfire, and invasive annuals interact to alter the potential abundance of key plant functional types that influence sagebrush ecological integrity: sagebrush, perennial grasses, and annual grasses. We provide GeoTIFFs of biome-wide projections of future sagebrush ecological integrity (as described in Holdrege et al., 2024) under two representative concentration pathways (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5) and time-periods (2031-2060 and 2071-2100) and we provide these projections for multiple model assumptions. Additionally, this data set provides accompanying projections of three of the components of sagebrush ecological integrity, which are the Q (‘quality’, see Doherty et al., 2022) scores for sagebrush, perennial forbs and grasses, and annual forbs and grasses. Additional GeoTIFFs included provide current (2017-2020) Q scores and sagebrush ecological integrity, as well as projected changes in the extent of Core Sagebrush Areas, Growth Opportunity Areas, and Other Rangeland Areas.

References:

Doherty, K., Theobald, D.M., Bradford, J.B., Wiechman, L.A., Bedrosian, G., Boyd, C.S., Cahill, M., Coates, P.S., Creutzburg, M.K., Crist, M.R., Finn, S.P., Kumar, A.V., Littlefield, C.E., Maestas, J.D., Prentice, K.L., Prochazka, B.G., Remington, T.E., Sparklin, W.D., Tull, J.C., Wurtzebach, Z., and Zeller, K.A., 2022, A sagebrush conservation design to proactively restore America’s sagebrush biome: U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2022–1081, 38 p., https://doi.org/10.3133/ofr20221081.