Are Sage‐Grouse Fine‐Scale Specialists or Shrub‐Steppe Generalists?

What is it about?

Sage‐grouse offer an illustrative case of a common situation in which management objectives, based on informal synthesis of findings of small‐scale field studies, are applied across a species' range. Our meta‐analyses of sage‐grouse nesting studies revealed that widely adopted habitat management objectives prescribe a narrow range of conditions found in only a small subset of breeding habitats successfully exploited by the species across its range, and have no relationship to demographic performance. We argue that current management strategies focus too heavily on fine-scale habitat attributes and place insufficient emphasis on strategic reduction of broad-scale drivers of habitat loss and fragmentation.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Long-term declines in sage-grouse populations throughout their range reflect the pervasive and complex threats to sagebrush rangelands including conifer woodland expansion, invasive annual grasses and wildfire, and human-driven land-use change. Management of sage-grouse habitat, however, remains disproportionately focused on fine-scale attributes of the rangelands that remain (e.g., ensuring the grass is at least 7" tall in nesting habitat). Like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, this fixation on fine-scale vegetation structure is an inappropriate response to the scope and complexity of the challenges facing sagebrush ecosystems. Our analysis reveals the lack of correspondence between fine-scale variables (like grass height or sagebrush cover) and a common metric of sage-grouse performance (nest success), and demonstrates the fallacy of extrapolating fine-scale habitat relationships to inform management assessments and decisions made at much larger spatial scales.

Perspectives