Species invasions can cause substantial and permanent changes to ecosystems, compromising their ability to support wildlife habitat and economic activities. Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) invasion in the Northern Great Basin (NGB) has dramatically changed the region's fire regime, leading to native species extirpation and causing rangeland degradation over tens of thousands of hectares. Future spatial dynamics of cheatgrass likely will be affected by climate change and could include movement of the species into previously uninvaded areas. Monitoring the cheatgrass invasion on NGB rangelands using remote sensing, biogeophysical, and climate data integrated into regression-tree models provides several benefits: 1) Land managers, policy makers, and scientists have access to historical and relatively current rangeland conditions over a broad geographical area; 2) mapping cheatgrass models can be relatively easily updated; and 3) future scenarios can be input into models to project estimates of future dynamics. This study presents data from 14 years of cheatgrass percent cover monitoring, provides estimates of future cheatgrass percent cover using future climate data, and provides maps and data analysis regarding cheatgrass percent cover and greater sage grouse priority areas of concern. The preliminary cheatgrass percent cover model training data R2 value = 0.84; the test data R2 = 0.83.
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