Emerging applications of ecosystem resilience and resistance (R&R) concepts in sagebrush ecosystems allow managers to better predict and mitigate impacts of wildfire and invasive annual grasses. Widely available soil survey information can be harnessed to spatially depict and evaluate relative resilience to disturbance and resistance to invasive species from regional to site scales. Using a newly aggregated data set of soil temperature and moisture regimes across the range of sage-grouse, we developed an abiotic index of R&R to facilitate landscape prioritization and triage that is now available online for practitioners to visualize and download. We also created a new soils report tool in Web Soil Survey that can be used to rapidly extract additional information, such as, soil textures, depths, and ecological sites to facilitate more detailed assessments of R&R at the project scale. Ecological site descriptions and associated state-and-transition models (STMs) available through soil surveys also provide important information for resilience-based management. Where site-specific STMs are not available, generalized STMs based on our R&R framework have been developed for the predominant ecological types across the sagebrush biome. Collectively, these new products and tools help managers read the landscape and inform rapid risk assessments, determine appropriate management strategies, and prioritize resources to maintain and restore functioning sagebrush ecosystems.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.