In this article we develop a simulation model for estimating the economic efficiency of fuel treatments and apply it to two sagebrush ecosystems in the Great Basin of the western United States: Wyoming Sagebrush Steppe and Mountain Big Sagebrush. These two ecosystems face the two most prominent resource management concerns in sagebrush ecosystems relative to wildfire: annual grass invasion and ...

Sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) habitat in the Intermountain West is one of the most endangered ecosystems in North America due, in part, to fire, climate change, and anthropogenic disturbances. However, restoration efforts rarely consider the dietary quality of sagebrush that is conserved or restored despite growing evidence that it is an influential parameter explaining habitat use by many importa...

Understanding selection of breeding habitat is critical to conserving and restoring habitats for the Greater Sage-Grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus), particularly in xeric landscapes (≤25 cm annual precipitation). We monitored radio-marked female sage-grouse in south-central Wyoming in 2008 and 2009 to assess microhabitat use during nesting and brood rearing. For each model we grouped variables...

Nonnative Bromus tectorum (cheatgrass) is decimating sagebrush steppe, one of the largest ecosystems in the Western United States, and is causing regional-scale shifts in the predominant plant-fungal interactions. Sagebrush, a native perennial, hosts arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), whereas cheatgrass, a winter annual, is a relatively poor host of AMF. This shift is likely intertwined with d...

The sage grouse (Crentrocercus urophasianus) is the largest North American grouse and depends on sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) for diet and protective cover. The association with sagebrush limits the range of sage grouse to the range of sagebrush. As a result of the loss of native sagebrush-grasslands, the range of sage grouse has decreased by over 50% since the turn of the century. Sage grouse ar...

Climate induced temporal variation, spatial patterns of vegetation and microenvironments, plant growth forms, soils and geology, and topographic factors influence hydrologicprocesses in rangelandenvironments. In Part I of this study,a gradient analy sis of 13 environmental variables identified temporal and spatial gradients in sagebrush coppice and interspacesoil surface cover types. Spatial co...

The Sagebrush Steppe Treatment Evaluation Project (SageSTEP) is a comprehensive, integrated, long-term study that evaluates the ecological effects of fire and fire surrogate treatments designed to reduce fuel and to restore sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) communities of the Great Basin and surrounding areas. SageSTEP has several features that make it ideal for testing hypotheses from state-and-trans...

Foraging herbivores must meet nutritional requirements by not only finding enough plant biomass to consume, but also finding plants with high protein content and low concentrations of potentially toxic plant secondary metabolites (PSMs). Greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus; hereafter, sage-grouse) are sagebrush obligate herbivores that consume relatively high concentrations of PSMs. ...

This study developed and tested four methods for shrub height measurements with airborne LiDAR data in a semiarid shrub-steppe in southwestern Idaho, USA. Unique to this study was the focus of sagebrush height measurements on sloped terrain. The study also developed one of the first methods towards estimating crown area of sagebrush from LiDAR. Both sagebrush height and crown area were underest...

We report the sequencing and assembly of three transcriptomes from Big (Artemisia tridentata ssp. wyomingensis and A. tridentata ssp. tridentata) and Low (A. arbuscula ssp. arbuscula) sagebrush. The sequence reads are available in the Sequence Read Archive of NCBI. We demonstrate the utilities of these transcriptomes for gene discovery and phylogenomic analysis. An assembly of 61,883 transcript...