SGI’s proactive, voluntary conservation model has conserved sagebrush cores but analysis shows more work to be done on invasive annual grasses.
In 2010, the USDA-Natural Resources Conservation Service launched the Sage Grouse Initiative. This voluntary, incentive-based conservation approach, part of the agency’s Working Lands for Wildlife efforts, uses Farm Bill resources to implement conservation on private working rangelands.
Today, the SGI, under the umbrella of WLFW, is one of the most durable and effective voluntary conservation efforts in the United States. Between 2010 and 2022, the SGI directed more than $600 million in conservation funding to the sagebrush biome and worked with more than 2,800 landowners to conserve millions of acres of working sagebrush rangeland.
A recent retrospective analysis of the SGI’s work over 12 years showed that this model has conserved not only sage grouse habitat, but also critical sagebrush core areas in the West. The analysis shows that between 60 and 70 percent of SGI’s conservation investments were made in ecologically important sagebrush rangelands. SGI’s targeted conifer management investments were 20 percent more effective at improving sagebrush health than scattered treatments. Clustered, highly targeted conservation easements in Montana helped protect some of the most intact sagebrush and grasslands in the northern Plains where land-use conversion is a major threat.
When the SGI was first launched, conserving and improving sagebrush habitat for sage grouse was the primary goal. As the SGI and other WLFW efforts evolved, new spatial technologies like the Rangelands Analysis Platform developed with direct support from WLFW staff at NRCS and researchers at WLFW-affiliated universities, have enabled an updated, spatially targeted approach to sagebrush conservation that focuses on proactively defending intact sagebrush cores from threats like conifer encroachment and invasive annual grasses. Existing and emerging science shows this approach confers benefits to sagebrush-dependent wildlife like sage grouse, sagebrush songbirds, and migratory big game.
This new approach is detailed in Working Lands for Wildlife’s 2021 Framework for Conservation Action in the Sagebrush Biome, which promotes a biome-wide, spatially targeted “Defend the Core, Grow the Core” approach to private lands conservation in sagebrush country.
These same technologies that helped the SGI evolve also helped inform the Sagebrush Conservation Design, a multi-agency effort published in 2022 that used “sagebrush ecological integrity” scores to classify the biome into Core Sagebrush Areas, Growth Opportunity Areas, and Other Rangelands. The SCD also identified and mapped three primary threats causing more than 90 percent of the loss and degradation of sagebrush ecological integrity: invasive annual grasses (69%) conifer encroachment (18%), and human modification (3%).
The WLFW science team regularly evaluates conservation effectiveness through rigorous co-produced science. With the SCD’s spatial framework and sagebrush ecological integrity metric, David Naugle, professor at the University of Montana and WLFW sagebrush biome science advisor, led a team that retrospectively evaluated the SGI’s conservation efforts within the context of the SCD.
The team’s goals for this evaluation were to:
The team found that from 2010-2022, SGI addressed encroaching conifers over more than 616,000 acres across the West. During the same period, conservation easements supported by SGI permanently removed the threat of cultivation and subdivision development for more than 800,000 acres. Managing invasive annual grass was the smallest of the three threats analyzed, but as awareness of this threat has grown recently, so have SGI investments through WLFW.
When the team looked at where those investments went relative to the SCD-identified Core, Growth, and Other Areas, they found that SGI’s science-based spatial targeting channeled between 60 and 70 percent of all SGI practices directly into SCD’s top-tier Core- and Growth-designated areas, thus largely avoiding degraded landscapes with low ecological integrity.
The SGI directed much of its investment in conservation easements into the Rocky Mountain region, which contains the majority of intact core and is experiencing local intensive land use change. Two such examples include northcentral Montana and southwest Wyoming – which the SCD identified as two of the largest Core Sagebrush Areas in the entire biome. In these landscapes, easements provide perpetual conservation benefits by preventing cultivation and subdivision, and by reducing these top-level threats, extend benefits to neighboring, often publicly owned, rangelands.
The SGI’s conifer management was also targeted, with 80% of conifer management efforts clustered in nine watersheds. Unlike easements in the Rocky Mountains, this work was largely accomplished farther west in the Great Basin. When the team looked at the SCD’s ecological integrity scores for those nine watersheds, they found that SGI has either reversed (7) or halted (2) the degradation of these landscapes from woodland expansion. Concentrating conifer management in these priority areas was 20% more effective at restoring [SCD-delineated] Core and Growth areas than the 5% gains realized in more scattered, individual treatments. This four-fold increase in effectiveness represents a breakthrough necessary to keep pace with ecosystem losses.
The team acknowledged that the SGI’s investments to date in managing invasive annual grasses have been significantly smaller than other conservation practices, and that invasive annuals represent the next frontier of WLFW efforts. They also found that invasive annual grasses have reduced the sagebrush ecological integrity of some of the SGI’s conifer management efforts, highlighting how this threat poses widespread risks to the biome, and how evaluations like this can improve conservation delivery and outcomes.
The SGI’s impact on conservation, through WLFW, is felt beyond acres treated and investments made. WLFW’s “Defend the Core, Grow the Core” strategy is foundational to the interagency-developed SCD. While SGI has proven to be a durable conservation catalyst for private lands, partnerships and cross-boundary work have always been key tenants of its work. These broader efforts have provided models for successful conservation at the scales needed to stem biome degradation. Finally, as SGI has evolved, technical transfer has become increasingly important, exemplified in recent partnerships like the invasive annual grasses Tech Transfer partnership with the University of Wyoming’s Institute for Managing Annual Grasses Invading Natural Ecosystems (IMAGINE) and its ongoing partnership with Utah State University to train practitioners on low-tech mesic and riparian restoration.
This paper is part of a special issue of the Journal of Rangeland Ecology and Management that includes 19 other articles that delve into the science of how, where, and why conservationists are deploying strategic conservation to save the sagebrush biome. Learn more and find all the papers and other resources at the Sagebrush Conservation Gateway.
FROM A BIRD TO A BIOME: DO SAGE GROUSE INITIATIVE EFFORTS CONTRIBUTE TO CONSERVATION OF THE SAGEBRUSH ECOSYSTEM?
Abstract: The Sage Grouse Initiative (SGI) administered by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) has served as a primary delivery mechanism for Farm Bill investments in voluntary conservation of private rangelands in the western U.S. for fifteen years. Consistent with interagency efforts to extend conservation beyond sage-grouse to the entire sagebrush biome, the SGI has evolved to focus on conservation actions that benefit wildlife by addressing complex ecosystem problems undermining the resilience of working lands. Recent development of the Sagebrush Conservation Design (SCD) provides a common framework to coordinate the efforts of many partners invested in saving the biome’s last remaining intact sagebrush ecosystems. In this forum paper, we explore the history of the SGI’s strategic conservation on private lands relative to the SCD and reflect on how it could be used to improve future conservation delivery. From 2010 to 2022, NRCS contributed $423USD million in Farm Bill funds through SGI to easements, conifer removal, and invasive annual grass management with the shared goal of defending and growing Core, with most SGI actions occurring in Core (6–14%) and Growth (an additional 40–57%). The SCD’s ecological integrity scores suggest that SGI-funded conifer removal has either reversed (7) or halted (2) the degradation attributable to conifer encroachment in nine focal landscapes. Concentrating conifer removals together was 20% more effective at restoring Core and Growth than the 5% gains realized among scattered, isolated treatments. Our evaluation also shows that invasive annuals are undermining the integrity of initial SGI investments and warrant more attention to defend and grow Core. Embracing the SCD could help the SGI more effectively achieve desired wildlife outcomes given the biological relevance of Cores to sage-grouse and sagebrush-obligate songbirds.
Citation: David E. Naugle, Jeremy D. Maestas, Scott L. Morford, Joseph T. Smith, Kristopher R. Mueller, Timothy Griffiths, Thad Heater, “From a Bird to a Biome: Exploring the Sage Grouse Initiative’s Role in Defending and Growing Sagebrush Core Areas,” Rangeland Ecology & Management, Volume 97, 2024, Pages 115-122
Permanent URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rama.2024.08.015
Acknowledgments: We thank the NRCS Easement Division and the Voyageur Team for providing datasets used in analyses. We also thank the NRCS Conservation Effects Assessment Project and the Outcomes Team for continually encouraging SGI to quantify the outcomes of Farm Bill investments. We also thank everyone who has contributed to the Assessment, Inventory and Monitoring (AIM, Bureau of Land Management), and Natural Resource Inventory (NRI, NRCS) datasets, which are essential for generating the landcover information used in our analyses. The findings and conclusions presented in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the USDA-NRCS.