Sagebrush
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The primary goal of this project was to assess the effect of climate change on carbon cycling in mature sagebrush ecosystems. We used initial soil characteristics and carbon values for three location and modeled future climate at those locations for four different climate scenarios. We found that mature sagebrush ecosystems continued to act as carbon sinks into the future under all different climate change scenarios. The magnitude of carbon storage differed depending on initial conditions and soil characteristics at each site. Climate change may affect the potential for sequestration by increasing carbon loss through respiration, but we found that increased losses were offset by increased gains through greater primary production.
Forecasts of sagebrush distribution across western land management agencies: Who owns the sagebrush?
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Species distribution models were used to predict how sagebrush distribution could change in response to climate change across land management agencies in the West. Models predict that sagebrush habitats will shift northward and upward in elevation and decrease greatly in extent. Mountainous higher elevation areas were predicted to maintain more sagebrush. U.S. Forest Service lands were predicted to lose proportionally less sagebrush area than non-federal land or the BLM. Analysis suggests that some agencies such as the BLM with the most experience managing sagebrush will lose much of this habitat, while other agencies such as the USFS may have new sagebrush habitats to manage.
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In the future, areas where sagebrush will expand, the leading edge, are predicted to be on the northern edge of its current range—predominately northeast Montana. Conversely, areas where the current sagebrush distribution is predicted to contract, the trailing edge, reside at the southern edge of the current distribution, including the Great Basin. Both of these projected shifts are most likely in response to predicted increased minimum temperature and changes in precipitation amount and seasonality. Climate and hydrological factors have the potential to strongly affect sagebrush regeneration because sagebrush does not reproduce asexually and depends solely on germination rates and seedling survival. By exploring these relationships using an ecohydrologic simulation model, we found that sagebrush germination is not expected to be limiting at either the leading or trailing edge. However, seedling survival was expected to decrease at the trailing edge while increasing at the leading edge.
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Paleovegetation studies show that even prior to anthropogenic influence, sage steppe communities were dynamic, and in some cases, susceptible to replacement by other vegetation communities (including forests) under changing climatic conditions.
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Public land management agencies are under increasing pressure to consider climate change impacts in their land-use planning process. As a first step, many agencies are conducting vulnerability assessments to identify the components of an ecosystem, or conservation targets, most at-risk from climate change. Vulnerability assessment is the first step towards a climate change adaptation plan.
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Findings of this research suggest that a hedge betting approach (employing more than one restoration method) can increase the probability of successful restoration. Broadcast seeding seed pillows and bare seed over two years resulted in a sagebrush restoration success rate of 86% compared to 36% if only one method was used in one year. Information generated from this study will help land managers successfully restore sage-grouse habitat after wildfires by pairing restoration methods with site characteristics.
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Our results demonstrated that the important predictors from Lidar-derived metrics had a strong correlation with field-measured biomass in the Random Forests (RF) regression models. The Stepwise Multiple Regression (SMR) results were similar but slightly better than RF. Overall, both RF and SMR methods explained more than 74% of the variance in biomass, with the most important Lidar variables being associated with vegetation structure and statistical measures of this structure (e.g., standard deviation of height was a strong predictor of biomass). Using our model results, we developed spatially-explicit Lidar estimates of total and shrub biomass across our study site in the Great Basin, U.S.A., for monitoring and planning in this imperiled ecosystem.
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Models explained much of the variability between predictions and manual measurements, and yet it is expected that future applications could produce even better results by reducing some of the methodological sources of error that we encountered. Our work demonstrates how terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) can be used efficiently to extend manual measurement of vegetation characteristics from small to large plots in grasslands and shrublands, with potential application to other similarly structured ecosystems. Our method shows that vegetation structural characteristics can be modeled without classifying and delineating individual plants, a challenging and time-consuming step common in previous methods applying TLS to vegetation inventory. Improving application of TLS to studies of shrub-steppe ecosystems will serve immediate management needs by enhancing vegetation inventories, environmental modeling studies, and the ability to train broader datasets collected from air and space.
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The Conservation Biology Institute, the Great Basin LCC, Oregon State University, and EcoAdapt hosted a workshop that presented a series of decision support tools for land managers in the PNW. You can access the tools discussed at the workshop, from this webpage.
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While the number of acres burned annually by uncharacteristic wildfire continues to grow, it is becoming exceedingly important for agencies to identify opportunities to use wildfire to meet multiple land management and resource objectives. When conditions allow for unplanned ignitions to be managed for one or more of these objectives, it may be appropriate to use wildfire during the peak of the traditional fire season. Management response to wildland fire on federal lands is based on objectives established in the applicable Land/Resource Management Plan and/or Fire Management Plan. Objectives are affected by changes in fuels, weather, topography; varying social understanding and tolerance; and involvement of other governmental jurisdictions having different missions and objectives. Coordination with resource specialists and development of mutually agreed to objectives is fundamental to being successful in achieving land and resource objectives with wildfire. This webinar discusses recommendations for implementing this process using case studies incorporating Mexican spotted owl management objectives into wildfire management and post-fire monitoring. Presented by Shaula Hedwall, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and Wesley Hall, Coconino National Forest.