Habitat Management

Prioritizing landscapes for sage-grouse habitat conservation is complicated by long-term changes in climate.

USGS and Colorado State University scientists are modelling multispecies connectivity through intact and disturbed areas of the sagebrush landscape.

Fire rehabilitation programs have existed within federal agencies since the early 1960s. The U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management are the largest users of emergency stabilization and rehabilitation (ES&R) funds, but these agencies only sporadically implement proposed monitoring and rarely use common protocols. As a result, it is impossible to draw scientifically credible conclusions...

Fuel breaks have the potential to minimize catastrophic losses of sagebrush habitat and sage-grouse populations by altering fire behavior and facilitating fire suppression. However, they may carry risks to sage-grouse populations—of habitat loss, fragmentation, cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) invasion, and alteration of sage-grouse movements—that have not been quantified.

The Colorado Plateau, centered around the four corners area of the Southwest, and includes much of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, is a large and important component of U.S. drylands. This important home to mountains, desert basins, dramatic canyons, arid woodlands, and grasslands is also one of North America’s most rapidly warming hot spots, with rates of warming of up to 2-3° C within...

Relict forests (i.e., forests unable to reestablish after disturbance) may develop in the southeastern U.S. in future predicted extreme temperature, flooding, and drought.

Lidar has proven itself as a valuable tool for providing high-resolution digital elevation models and for quantifying forest stand metrics utilized by the forest industry. Studies are only beginning to emerge relating lidar data directly to wildlife species occurrences and abundances. NPWRC has been assessing capabilities of lidar data in various ecosystems to include the mixed forests in Maine...

USGS scientists are evaluating the use of quantile regression to develop models of sage-grouse population changes across the United States.

The focus of our research is on the restoration and monitoring of the plants and soils of the Intermountain West. Our lab is part of the Snake River Field Station, but is located in Corvallis, Oregon. Research topics include fire rehabilitation effects and effectiveness, indicators of rangeland health, invasive species ecology, and restoration of shrub steppe ecosystems.

Land use and unintentional (e.g., wildfire) disturbances are increasingly dominant factors affecting land-use planning and management of semiarid landscapes, particularly in sagebrush steppe rangelands. In the last 10-20 years, wildfires are occurring more frequently and increasingly in very large burn patches.

Fuel loads are important drivers of fire behavior, and fire is an important natural process that can also be used as a tool for ecological restoration purposes. Land managers and fire experts attempt to track and manipulate fuel loads in order to assess fire risk, control fire behavior, and restore ecosystems. Thus, understanding the relationships between fire, vegetation dynamics, and fuel loads...

This research theme provides land managers information to help them make restoration decision at local and landscape scales.