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Jeremy Maestas

This Report provides a strategic approach for conservation of sagebrush ecosystems and Greater SageGrouse (sage-grouse) that focuses specifically on habitat threats caused by invasive annual grasses and altered fire regimes. It uses information on factors that influence (1) sagebrush ecosystem resilience to disturbance and resistance to invasive annual grasses and (2) distribution, relative abundance, and persistence of sage-grouse populations to develop management strategies at both landscape and site scales. A sage-grouse habitat matrix links relative resilience and resistance of sagebrush ecosystems with sage-grouse habitat requirements for landscape cover of sagebrush to help decision makers assess risks and...
Emerging applications of ecosystem resilience and resistance concepts in sagebrush ecosystems allow managers to better predict and mitigate impacts of wildfire and invasive annual grasses. Soil temperature and moisture strongly influence the kind and amount of vegetation, and consequently, are closely tied to sagebrush ecosystem resilience and resistance (Chambers et al. 2014, 2016). Soil taxonomic temperature and moisture regimes can be used as indicators of resilience and resistance at landscape scales to depict environmental gradients in sagebrush ecosystems that range from cold/cool-moist sites to warm-dry sites. We aggregated soil survey spatial and tabular data to facilitate broad-scale analyses of resilience...
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We developed spatial overlays (i.e., “threat matrices”) by combining spatial models of threats (30-m x 30-m pixels) with multispecies cores for sagebrush obligate bird abundance (1-mi2 hexagons). Spatial information was retained in the overlays for three categories of bird core areas (70, 50, and 25%) in the No to Low category of threat classification, and for the 70% bird core area (inclusive of the 50% and 25% cores) for the highest three categories of threat classification (No to Low, Moderate, High, and Very High). For the WGA Annual Herbaceous layer, the four categories were 0-10, 11-25, 26-50, and > 50% cover.
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Research and Publications Authored and Supported by GBLCC Staff
FY2010In addition to regional Science and Traditional Ecological Knowledge projects that the Great Basin LCC (GBLCC) supports, GBLCC staff lend technical expertise to a range of projects and have contributed to important regional publications on a range of subjects. These publications range in type from textbooks, to management-oriented science and conservation plans, to scientific papers and have covered subjects like wind erosion following fire, soil microbiota response to drought, plant community resilience to invasive species, and alpine plant communities. In many cases these publications form foundations for scientifically-informed management strategies across the Great Basin.
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Values represent percent of surrounding landscape (5K) are dominated by sagebrush cover. Reclassified LANDFIRE 2013 Existing Vegetation Type by selecting the ecological systems containing sagebrush (Codes: 2080, 2125, 2126, 2220, 2064, 2072, 2079, 2124) to create a binary raster dataset with 1 for the sagebrush land cover types and zero for all others.To incorporate sagebrush lost to fire in fires since the Landsat was flown in 2010 that Landfire was derived from, I used fire perimeters from 2011,2012, & 2013 to reclassify pixels designated as having sagebrush as 0 (not having sagebrush), which assumes a homogenous burn (in reality there may be patches of sagebrush left within a burn perimeter). I then ran focalsum...
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