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Shawn Espinosa

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Integrating Spatially Explicit Indices of Abundance and Habitat Quality: An Applied Example for Greater Sage-grouse Management
This USGS data release represents geospatial data for the sage-grouse habitat mapping project. This study provides timely and highly useful information about greater sage-grouse over a large area of the Great Basin. USGS researchers and their colleagues created a template for combining landscape-scale occurrence or abundance data with habitat selection data in order to identify areas most critical to sustaining populations of species of conservation concern. The template also identifies those areas where land use changes have minimal impact. To inform greater sage-grouse conservation planning, the researchers developed greater sage-grouse habitat management categories based on habitat selection indices (HSI) and...
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...
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Managers require quantitative yet tractable tools that can identify areas for restoration yielding effective benefits for targeted wildlife species and the ecosystems they inhabit. A spatially explicit conservation planning tool that guides effective sagebrush restoration for sage-grouse can be made more effective by integrating baseline maps describing existing (pre-restoration) habitat suitability, and the distribution and abundance of breeding sage-grouse. Accordingly, we provide two rasters. The first is a floating point raster file informed by lek data, and derived from: 1) utilization distributions weighted by lek attendance, and 2) a non-linear probability of space-use relative to distance to lek. The second...
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