Rangeland Ecology & Management

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WHO WILL MANAGE SAGEBRUSH HABITATS IN A FUTURE OF RAPID CLIMATE CHANGE
Author
Wisely, Samantha M.
Andrew Satterlee, S.
Boughton, Raoul K.
Be, Nicholas A.
Milleson, Michael P.
Adler, Peter B.
Publisher
Society for Range Management
Publication Year
2015
Body

Species distribution models (SDM) predict that areas with climate suitable for sagebrush ecosystems will shift northwards and shrink in size over the next century due to global warming. So far, however, there has been little discussion about how shifts in sagebrush distribution will be spread out across private and public land and across major land management agencies. We built a SDM for sagebrush fit to presence absence data from the SW and NW Regional GAP land cover datasets and used it to project the distribution of areas suitable for sagebrush at the end of the century based on climate models. Our SDM predicts that areas suitable for sagebrush will decline greatly in extent by the end of the century under both high and low emissions scenarios. Under a low emissions scenario, our SDM predicts losses of area suitable for sagebrush of over 40% on US Forest Service and BLM lands, 60% on non-federal lands, nearly 70% on National Park Service lands and over 90% on Department of Defense lands. Some new areas may become suitable for sagebrush on National Park Service and US Forest Service lands, but these gains are projected to be small compared to losses. Our analysis agrees with the dramatic loss of suitable habitat for sagebrush predicted by previous SDMs, but that these losses will not occur evenly over land management agencies. Sagebrush management may benefit from transferring institutional knowledge about these ecosystems from agencies that will lose sagebrush habitat to agencies that will gain sagebrush habitat in coming decades.

Language
English
Resource Type
Text
Document Type
Conference Proceedings
Conference Name
SRM Sacramento, CA