Rangeland Ecology & Management

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IMPORTANCE OF WET MEADOWS FOR GREATER SAGE-GROUSE IN THE GREAT BASIN
Author
Street, Phillip A.
Sedinger, Jim
Publisher
Society for Range Management
Publication Year
2018
Body

Identifying quality habitat is a critical step in the conservation and management of populations.� Species often select habitat that maximizes their fitness in terms of reproduction and survival.� For Greater Sage-grouse, the presence of protein rich forbs is required for chicks to persist and grow on the landscape.� In the Great Basin, many of these forbs are abundant in spring, but die during dry summers, with the exception of forbs found in moisture-rich refuges.� These refuges can be either in the form of wet meadows or at elevations that are high enough to receive more precipitation than the surrounding landscape.� Using known locations of sage-grouse during July and August from 2013 to 2017, we built a year-specific resource selection model to identify these refuges as high quality late summer habitat.� We assessed how the location of sage-grouse on the landscape relative to the predicted late summer habitat quality, affected survival of pre-fledged chicks and adults.� We found that chicks in predicted lower quality habitat did not survive as well as chicks in higher quality habitat.� Alternatively, adults that spent more time in the high quality habitat did not survive as well as adults that were located in habitat of lower quality.� These results suggest that moisture rich refuges are essential for successful reproduction but attending these refuges likely comes at a cost in terms of adult survival.� We hypothesize these cost are due to biotic processes such as density dependence and predation.� We fit the habitat model to a validation dataset located 260 km from where the data used to train the model were collected, and found that the model accurately predicted where the birds were through both space and time.�� A predicted surface was created for the entire state of Nevada.� Identifying these areas will help the mangers balance grazing pressure, mining, and energy development in the Great Basin with the long term persistence of sage-grouse.

Language
English
Resource Type
Text
Document Type
Conference Proceedings
Conference Name
SRM Reno, NV