Soon To Be Released: WAFWA Sagebrush Conservation Strategy, Part I
The sagebrush biome once spanned several hundred million acres but now occupies less than 161 million acres in the western U.S. It is considered one of the most imperiled ecosystems in the world. To improve coordination and effectiveness of the many people working in this landscape, the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (WAFWA) is coordinating the development of a Sagebrush Conservation Strategy to guide future conservation efforts. This is being implemented with support from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Geological Survey, state wildlife agencies and universities, and many others.
Part I of the Sagebrush Conservation Strategy is a summary and analysis of the latest science pertaining to the myriad challenges confronting managers of the sagebrush ecosystem that covers portions of 14 Western states and two Canadian provinces. It was produced by a team of 94 scientists and specialists from 34 federal and state agencies, universities, and non-governmental organizations. Part I is going to be published online in March in the form of a U.S. Geological report that describes how human and wildlife communities are dependent on healthy sagebrush plant communities for their well-being, each of the diverse threats to the biome, and evaluates the efficacy of efforts to address them.
This 368-page document chronicles the incendiary relationship between a warming climate, increasing fuel loads from cheatgrass and other invasive annual grasses, and human ignitions leading to sagebrush mega-fires that destroy sagebrush at a rate beyond its ability to recover or our ability to restore it. On average, about 1.2 million acres of sagebrush burn each year, yet only a fraction of burned or degraded areas can be restored annually. The frequency and size of fires are also increasing. It also evaluates the degree to which current efforts to conserve the Greater Sage-grouse, a focus of current sagebrush management, are likely to conserve other species that are dependent on or associated with sagebrush.
This is the most significant effort bringing together the science guiding the conservation of the sagebrush biome undertaken to date. Part I of the strategy will be followed by a second part that clearly outlines what it will take to halt the loss of this imperiled ecosystem.
Part II entails strategies describing how to coordinate actions of the hundreds of entities engaged in sagebrush conservation, prioritize sagebrush landscapes, and increase capacity for conservation in the sagebrush biome at national, regional, and local scales. These strategies are being developed by the same multi-disciplinary team and will be published by USGS later this year. The proposed strategies were informed by a 3-day, virtual stakeholder engagement process held in the spring of 2020. These strategies build on many examples across the biome where state, federal, or private efforts are successfully addressing these challenges collaboratively.
The second part of the Sagebrush Conservation Strategy provides a roadmap for voluntary conservation measures for managing and conserving the sagebrush ecosystem that builds on conservation measures already in place for sage-grouse. The goal is to maintain dependent plant and animal communities as well as traditional human uses of this landscape. It is intended to be an “all-hands, all-lands” inclusive, and non-regulatory approach. This is important because it can provide decision-makers and stakeholders the information that can lead to a common vision and objective for sagebrush conservation, and a common set of priorities and strategic approaches that can attain these objectives.
Much of Part II focuses on ways in which capacity for sagebrush conservation can be increased, and it contains descriptions of many case studies of collaborative conservation approaches across the West that are succeeding as models to be emulated and scaled up. A key component is a description of conservation capacity needed at local, regional, and national scales (for instance early fire detection and rapid suppression capability, or seed production and storage capability for restoration, etc.), and a gap analysis of where those capabilities are missing so they can be addressed.
In short, Part II of the Strategy will provide land managers and decision-makers with the what to do, where to do it, and how to do it strategies that will enable us to reverse declining trends in sagebrush, sagebrush-dependent wildlife such as sage-grouse, and ensure human services from these ecosystems such as ranching, hunting, carbon sequestration, and water delivery continue to exist in the future.
