We are the Sage-Steppe Habitat Response (Sage-SHARE) working group dedicated to creating products for land managers which address complex landscape scale issues. Our key partners include Oregon State University, USDA Agricultural Research Service, The Nature Conservancy, US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Institute for Natural Resources, and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Sagebrush ecosystems face existential threats from invasive annual grasses and expanding conifers. Mesic areas within the sagebrush ecosystem, which support 80% of wildlife while comprising roughly 2% of the landscape, are threatened by a variety of factors that can lead to lowered water table and loss of riparian vegetation. Land managers need to work at large spatial scales but have limited resources. The SageSHARE team created frameworks to efficiently identify, discuss and address landscape-level threats in upland and mesic systems throughout the northern Great Basin. With the Threat-Based Land Management (TBLM) method, users map simplified ecological states and estimate future trend. This decision-support system directly promotes management objectives by helping users understand relevant threats to the ecosystem, become familiar with ecological states using a simplified decision tree and threat models, make management decisions and apply conservation measures, learn how to determine apparent trend and finally take the first steps in identifying management actions for each state. Millions of acres have been or will be enrolled in Candidate Conservation Agreements with Assurances for sage-grouse CCA/As, and many more will fall under mitigation projects. The framework is currently used on the upland portions of these lands in Oregon, and a beta version currently is in place for flowing mesic systems.
The upland framework is currently in use on hundreds of thousands of acres of private and public land, and now SageSHARE presents peer-reviewed resources published through the Pacific Northwest Extension Catalog. The larger Manager’s guide provides the science and details behind the Threat Based Land Management framework, while the field guide is designed specifically for use in the field as a quick reference guide, and is printed on folded water-resistant paper.
Stay tuned for peer-reviewed Field Guide and Manager’s Guide for Mesic Systems.
SageSHARE products
Threat-Based Land Management in the Northern Great Basin: A Manager’s Guide
Threat-Based Land Management in the Northern Great Basin: A Field Guide
Guides for Understanding and Managing Flowing Waters in Sagebrush Ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest
Listen to Chad Boyd, co-author on the Guides, Talk about Threat-Based Land Management
Online Web Based Training for Threat-Based Land Management
Threat-Based Land Management Course for Rangeland Management Using Google Earth Pro, GIS Online
Private and public land managers across the western sagebrush steppe closely observe how management impacts plant communities. Sometimes these observations are documented while other times they are not. Global Information Systems (GIS), such as Google Earth Pro (GEP) provide a powerful digital mapping platform to allow land managers to track, visualize and share inventoried and monitored data. Maps can serve as effective communication tools and GIS can allow managers to incorporate free extensive remotely sensed data that can aide land managers in rangeland management decisions, such as historic fire layers, soils data and fine fuels information.
Click the button below to access the self-paced course to equip land owners and natural resource professionals with a science-based framework and skills to develop land management plans and virtual maps of lands they manage. The online course will walk learners through principles needed to create effective land management plans using a Threat-based Land Management ecological framework, as well as skills directly related to creating a virtual map of managed land within GEP.
