Restoring the West's Precious Wet Habitats
Loss and degradation of mesic resources – riparian areas, wet meadows, seeps, and springs – reduces overall rangeland resilience and productivity.
Mesic resources – stream corridors, wet meadows, seeps, springs, and other places where water meets land – are critical to the West's wildlife and people.
In this dry landscape, water is life – for people, wildlife, and plants. Yet, these precious places make up only 2% of the Western landscape.
Healthy and functioning mesic resources retain soil moisture late into the season, providing plants with the resource they need to stay green long after upland vegetation dries out.
In essence, healthy mesic areas act like sponges—storing water, sustaining green vegetation, and providing more "green groceries" for wildlife and livestock.
While they only cover a small portion of the landscape, they support 80% of sagebrush wildlife during some portion of their lifecycle.
-
- Wet meadow
-
- Riparian areas
-
- Seeps and springs
Beyond their agricultural role, these areas support recreation, hunting, and cultural values that tie communities to the landscape.
Maintaining and restoring the function and resilience of the West’s precious mesic resources is a shared vision benefiting both agricultural producers and wildlife.
Generally, WLFW and the NRCS encourage the following practices where they make the most sense for the local landscape, partners, and restoration goals.
Grazing Management
Spring Protection and Enhancement
Low-Tech, Process-Based Restoration
Woody Plant Removal
Mechanical Restoration
Conservation Easements
Grazing Management
Because riparian and wet meadow areas stay greener longer into the summer than surrounding uplands, they often require different grazing management strategies. Implementing grazing plans with specific riparian and wet meadow goals can boost the health and productivity of these vital resources.
Spring Protection and Enhancement
In order to sustain water and forage on the range, it’s important to enhance mesic habitat conditions by: considering springs and seeps in grazing management strategies; minimizing impacts when developing new livestock water, and retrofitting or redeveloping existing spring developments.
Low-Tech, Process-Based Restoration
Active restoration may be necessary in some instances to enhance degraded riparian areas, meadows, swales, and other mesic areas. A variety of simple, cost-effective restoration structures can be installed by hand, using ‘sticks and stones’ to boost hydrologic function and productivity.
Woody Plant Removal
Targeted woody plant (pinyon-juniper, ponderosa pine, Douglas fir) removal can provide tree-free movement corridors for wildlife while improving late-season water availability and forage production.
Mechanical Restoration
In limited situations where resource values are high, more costly mechanical restoration techniques may be appropriate to restore down-cut wet meadows to their historic floodplains.
Conservation Easements
Easements are a tool available to compensate private landowners for permanently protecting the most critical meadows and other mesic areas in wildlife strongholds, ensuring working lands remain intact and productive for future generations.
Effective mesic conservation and restoration strategies require an understanding of where these resources persist, how consistently they function through time, and how they connect to surrounding upland habitats.
When uplands and floodplains are functionally connected, snowmelt and precipitation can be stored in soils rather than rapidly exported downstream.
Even though mesic restoration is beneficial wherever it happens, limited conservation capacity makes it essential to strategically prioritize where efforts will yield the greatest ecological benefit if the goal is to achieve large-scale outcomes.
WLFW’s approach for tackling this threat prioritizes protection and early intervention to maintain and enhance vulnerable wet habitats over intensive restoration of highly degraded areas such as streams and meadows that are deeply incised and lack floodplain connectivity.
To support this strategy, WLFW has developed a growing suite of science-based tools that help managers, practitioners, and landowners. The Mesic Analysis Platform is WLFW's best tool for identifying priority restoration opportunities, guiding conservation investments, and tracking ecological outcomes across the sagebrush biome.
A new web-based app developed by Working Lands for Wildlife called the Mesic Analysis Platform (MAP) helps conservationists, ranchers, restoration practitioners, and land managers identify and protect these vital wet places across the sagebrush biome.
This hour-long webinar dives into mesic resources and how to use the Mesic Analysis Platform to improve mesic restoration across the sagebrush biome.