The Great Northern Landscape Conservation Cooperative (GNLCC) is sponsoring the Sage Steppe Partner Forum to help facilitate collaboration among conservation practitioners and partnerships that share landscape conservation challenges in an eco-geographic context. Draft Partner Forum guidance suggests that field-level managers, scientists, and conservation constituents will, through a loosely structured process, identify priority conservation information and scientific needs that fall within the scope of the Great Northern LCC Strategic Conservation Framework.
The sagebrush-steppe biome covers some 480,000 square miles in 14 western states and provinces expanding the SSPF challenge to areas outside the GNLCC geography. The other LCCs operating in sagebrush-steppe (Plains and Prairie Potholes, Southern Rockies, Great Basin) have engaged the Partner Forum concept as a useful mechanism to inform landscape-scale conservation planning and deliver for the region.
Many entities operate in the sagebrush-steppe biome and several prioritization processes have been conducted (e.g., USFWS 2013, Hanser and Manier 2013) resulting in a tremendous amount of completed and on-going research as well as multi-scale conservation delivery programs in the region. There is an urgent need for improved communication to reduce redundancy, increase and improve technological transfer, and facilitate cross-coordination to complete adaptive management feedback loops.
FY2015and FY2016 Objectives: Improve and expand the functionality of the Sage Steppe Partner Forum wiki by integrating to the extent possible, multiple project tracking mechanisms to capture and contextualize ongoing and completed research projects in the sagebrush biome
Improve and advance the sagebrush and sage-grouse data repository on LC MAP/ScienceBase
Support the emerging Sagebrush Conservation Science Network and the initial projects implemented
