With PReSET, researchers from USGS, Colorado State University, and Oklahoma State University aimed to address three challenges facing resource managers when restoring sagebrush ecosystems: limited funding, varying success of restoration techniques across the biome, and differing wildlife species’ habitat and conservation needs. To address these challenges, PReSET combines data related to management objectives, current landcover conditions, future climate scenarios, and ecological resilience to identify planning units with the greatest capacity for overall project success.
To pilot the new tool, researchers chose the 14-million-acre region of southwestern Wyoming where the Wyoming Landscape Conservation Initiative focuses its efforts to enhance wildlife habitats while facilitating responsible energy development. This region encompasses a checkerboard of private and public lands used for energy development, mining, ranching, farming, and recreation. It also contains core sagebrush habitat, core sage-grouse population areas (Fig 1), and available data relevant to sagebrush ecosystem restoration (for example, data on other species of management concern, oil and gas development, and vegetation cover).
In a landscape-scale application, researchers used PReSET to identify areas within WLCI where managers could maximize multi-species wildlife benefits while reducing time to sagebrush recovery (Fig 1). In a local-scale application, they then prioritized conservation actions within areas identified in the landscape-scale application. The local-scale application identified sites with highest local-level restoration potential, providing finer grain information for site-level planning. (Fig 2). Overall, researchers demonstrated the ability of the tool to prioritize areas of highest restoration potential across scales given various management priorities, and the overall flexibility of the tool to shifting manager needs.
This United States Geological Survey news article "A decision support tool for optimized management of sagebrush ecosystems" was originally found on https://www.usgs.gov/news
