Annual Herbaceous Cover across Rangelands of the Sagebrush Biome

Abstract

Data are cross-listed on https://rangelands.app/cheatgrass/ Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) and other invasive annual grasses represent one of the single largest threats to the health and resilience of western rangelands. To address this challenge, the Western Governors Association (WGA)-appointed Western Invasive Species Council convened a cheatgrass working group to develop a new regional vision for invasive annual grass management across the West. Foundational to implementing this new vision is the creation of a common spatial map to guide strategic actions. The WGA cheatgrass working group sought to develop a 30-m base map of annual herbaceous cover to support a common spatial strategy for tackling invasive annual grasses across the western U.S. Here, we leverage three large-scale datasets to provide land managers with a product estimating the recent extent (2016-2018) of annuals across western rangelands. Input annual herbaceous datasets include Rangeland Analysis Platform (Jones et al. 2018), US Geological Survey (USGS) Harmonized Landsate and Sentinel (Pastick et al. 2020, Pastick et al. in prep) and USGS National Land Cover Database (Rigge et al. 2020). These three datasets are combined using a weighted mean approach to generate the final annual herbaceous mean cover product across the sagebrush biome (Jeffries and Finn 2019).