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View field guide.
This field guide is a tool for the identification of 119 common forbs found in the sagebrush rangelands and grasslands of the northern Great Basin. These forbs are important because they are either browsed directly by Greater Sage-grouse or support invertebrates that are also consumed by the birds. Species are arranged alphabetically by genus and species within families. Each species has a botanical description and one or more color photographs to assist the user. Most descriptions mention the importance of the plant and how it is used by Greater Sage-grouse.
Webinar recording.
A diverse group of panelists have been brought together to highlight a variety of engagement strategies in diverse communities. Caty Johnson from Nuestra Casa, Jerry McAdams from the Boise Fire Department, Jon Riley from Chelan County Fire District 1, and Kirsten Cook from Okanogan Conservation District will share their approaches, successes, and strategies for stirring up action.
Access brief and journal article.
Easy-to-understand monitoring frameworks create a common baseline resource standard that can be easily understood and allow diverse stakeholders with different needs to work together to restore and protect Mediterranean-type ecosystems into the future. This research brief provides an example of conceptual modeling framework.
Join the Western Region of the Wildland Fire Leadership Council (WFLC) and the Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network (FAC Net) for a panel-style webinar.
See also, this Smoke Resources List developed from the webinar.
View article.
This paper examines administrative policies and barriers to using outcome-based approaches to manage fire risk in Idaho through 70 semistructured interviews with permittees, BLM staff, and other agency and nongovernmental stakeholders in three Idaho BLM field areas. We analyzed how rules and norms in policy implementation contributed to perceptions of barriers within and among different field areas. Factors affecting perceptions of outcome-based rangeland management implementation included BLM staff tenure, permittee-agency relationships, beliefs about the efficacy of grazing to manage fire risk, and leadership and staff experience in navigating National Environmental Policy Act requirements or potential lawsuits. Differences in the informal institutions among field areas led to different interpretations of latitude found within formal institutions (“gray zones”) for implementation. This study highlights the importance of local context and the interactions between administrative policies and agency culture for implementing adaptive approaches to managing wildfire risk on public rangelands.
View article.
These findings underscore that type conversion is a common outcome of high-severity wildland fire in the southwestern US. Ecosystem managers are frontline observers of these far-reaching and potentially persistent changes, making their experiences valuable in further developing intervention strategies and research agendas. As its drivers increase with climate change, vegetation type conversion (VTC) appears increasingly likely in many ecological contexts and may require management paradigms to transition as well. Approaches to VTC potentially include developing new models of desired conditions, the use of experimentation by managers, and broader implementation of adaptive management strategies. Continuing to support and develop science-manager partnerships and peer learning groups will help to shape our response to ongoing rapid ecological transformations.
Watch video
This video discusses the BLMs plans to create 350 miles of fire breaks between Boise and Glenns Ferry in hopes of catching fires when they’re small. The BLM Boise District is working together with the rancher-led Mountain Home Rangeland Fire Protection Association, Idaho Dept. of Lands, and the Idaho Transportation Department.
To highlight the effectiveness and on-going success of this multi-faceted working lands approach, they’ve introduced the “Healthy Sagebrush Communities” website, story map, and poster.
The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), through its Sage Grouse Initiative (SGI), is there to empower ranchers to make well-balanced improvements on their ranching operations that are good for wildlife living in sagebrush country, as well as their business’s bottom line.
View article.
The goal of this paper is to go beyond drawing on distinct disciplinary perspectives to develop a holistic view of extreme wildfire event (EWE) as a social-ecological phenomenon. Based on literature review and using a transdisciplinary approach, this paper proposes a definition of EWE as a process and an outcome. Considering the lack of a consistent “scale of gravity” to leverage extreme wildfire events such as in natural hazards (e.g., tornados, hurricanes, and earthquakes) we present a proposal of wildfire classification with seven categories based on measurable fire spread and behavior parameters and suppression difficulty.
Access dataset and additional information.
This dataset provides an estimate of 2015 cheatgrass percent cover in the northern Great Basin at 250 meter spatial resolution. The information is designed to provide a near-real-time estimate of cheatgrass in the northern Great Basin for 2015 to optimize land management efforts to control cheatgrass, preserve critical greater sage-grouse habitat, and inform fire control and prevention. Timely maps of dynamic cheatgrass percent cover are needed in early summer for these purposes. Research shows that cheatgrass percent cover is spatially and temporally highly variable in arid and semiarid environments because cheatgrass germination and growth is highly sensitive to annual weather, especially precipitation totals and timing. Precipitation totals and timing are also spatially and temporally highly variable in these environments; therefore, this dataset is only representative of cheatgrass percent cover during 2015 and does not represent any other time period.