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Feds Launch Effort To Protect Sage Grouse And Stop Wildfires In The Great Basin

The Department of Interior is crafting a plan to preserve the habitat of the greater sage grouse, pictured here. CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK
The Department of Interior is crafting a plan to preserve the habitat of the greater sage grouse, pictured here. CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell has instructed her department’s land managers and scientists to begin a crash effort to develop a strategy for combatting wildfires and restoring severely degraded sagebrush rangelands across millions of acres in the Great Basin of the interior West.

Jewell’s secretarial order released Monday seemed designed to show progress in federal government efforts to protect habitat for the greater sage grouse in the face of a court order directing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to determine by this year if the chicken-like bird should be protected under the Endangered Species Act. If the sage grouse, which has lost more than half of its original 290 million acres of habitat in the West, is listed as endangered or threatened it could have a huge economic effect on oil and gas development, ranching and other sectors across many western states.

The order made no mention of what is perhaps a greater imperative for restoring native plants and biodiversity in the sagebrush-steppe ecosystem of the Great Basin, where a massive invasion of non-native grasses, particularly cheatgrass, has turned millions of acres into a fire-prone monoculture. As Climate Progress has reported, finding innovative ways to beat back the cheatgrass invasion and restore sagebrush and other native plants has a huge potential for sequestering carbon and aiding in the fight against global climate change. Restoring those landscapes would also have a major benefit in reducing the size and frequency of wildfires, which between 1990 and 2007 burned more than 16 million acres in the Great Basin.

Jewell directed the agencies under her department to quickly develop a “comprehensive science-based strategy to address the more frequent and intense wildfires that are damaging vital sagebrush landscapes and productive rangelands, particularly in the Great Basin region of Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Oregon and California.” She said the strategy should tackle not just wildfires but also the spread of cheatgrass and other invasives.

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“Targeted action is urgently needed to conserve habitat for the greater sage grouse and other wildlife in the Great Basin, as well as to maintain ranching and recreation economies that depend on sagebrush landscapes,” Jewell said in a prepared statement.

Cheatgrass, an annual grass that is native to Eurasia and came to the U.S. in the 19th Century, has been called “the invader that won the West.” It is particularly well adapted to taking over sagebrush rangelands. It easily invades areas that have been disturbed — such as by livestock grazing and fire. It outcompetes natives by maturing early and hogging moisture and nutrients. It produces huge quantities of seeds that can survive in the soil for several years. And because it dries out early in the season, it provides ample fine fuel for wildfires — and then thrives even more in burned areas.

The cheatgrass invasion has also turned some western landscapes from carbon sinks into carbon sources — meaning instead of absorbing carbon from the atmosphere, the landscapes are now net emitters of carbon. Researchers have found that the invasion has released some 9 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere and will release about six times that much more in coming decades. Because sagebrush is a perennial with deep and abundant root systems, it sequesters far more carbon than annuals like cheatgrass. Restored cold desert shrublands, wrote U.S. Forest Service research ecologist Susan Meyer, “are a particularly good choice for management for increased carbon sequestration.”

Meyer and her colleagues at the Forest Service’s Shrub Sciences Laboratory in Provo, Utah, have been conducting promising research into biological controls for cheatgrass, but the research team has shrunk dramatically in size with budget cuts in recent years.