Integrating Ecosystem Resilience and Resistance Into Decision Support Tools for Multi-Scale Population Management of a Sagebrush Indicator Species

Wildfire and the ecological niche: Diminishing habitat suitability for an indicator species within semi‐arid ecosystems

“…Our analytical approach can identify ecological traps and possible sink habitats across other life‐stages (e.g., adult and juvenile selection and survival), and may be extended to any species where data on selection and survival can be collected. Finally, parameter estimates from selection and survival models, coupled with spatially explicit estimates of sagebrush recovery (Ricca & Coates, 2020), inform generalizable planning tools (Ricca et al., 2018) for efficiently prioritizing localized postfire restoration efforts across large spatial extents to recover losses in breeding habitat suitability.…”

Postfire growth of seeded and planted big sagebrush—strategic designs for restoring greater sage‐grouse nesting habitat

“…The combination of nesting and foraging patches would mimic combinations of nest sites and non‐nest, random locations of big sagebrush cover where Gregg et al (1994) documented successful nests and broods. The foraging patch, including nesting patches, could be strategically planted within a few kilometers of a recently burned sage‐grouse lek and near potential brood‐rearing habitat (Ricca & Coates 2020) to quickly achieve nesting habitat. The foraging patch would be surrounded by an even larger and less dense (<5% cover) background restoration area (tens to thousands of hectares or larger).…”

“…In summary, restoration practitioners in big sagebrush ecosystems are faced with choices when attempting to maintain wildlife populations and quickly restore habitats after large wildfires. If they opt to do nothing, big sagebrush is unlikely to reestablish quickly enough to sustain sage‐grouse populations (Coates et al 2016; Monroe et al 2019; Ricca & Coates 2020). Seeding big sagebrush is the least expensive active restoration option to implement, but has the least likelihood of successfully establishing plants, especially at the required densities and in the warmer and drier environments if seeding is only attempted once (Shriver et al 2018).…”

Range-wide greater sage-grouse hierarchical monitoring framework—Implications for defining population boundaries, trend estimation, and a targeted annual warning system

“…This conceptual framework is particularly important given widespread wildfire and annual grass invasions altering disturbance regimes and state-transitions across much of the sagebrush biome (Chambers and others, 2019). These complexities also motivate better accounting of asynchronies between faster sage-grouse population dynamics and slower sagebrush ecosystem recovery processes in decision support tools, such as the TAWS (Coates and others, 2016;Ricca and Coates, 2020).…”

“…Consequently, CC-E has undergone rapid population declines over the past two periods of oscillation and recent evidence indicates that such long-term habitat loss from wildfire nullifies positive effects typically associated with years of increased precipitation (Coates and others, 2016). Thus, the vast spatial extent of wildfire and subsequent state-transitions to annual grasslands across much of this climate cluster may simply outpace implemented restoration efforts owing to spatial and temporal asynchronies between slower sagebrush recovery processes and more immediately reactive sage-grouse demographic responses (Ricca and Coates, 2020).…”