| parts | | type | Technical Summary |
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| value | In response to concerns about declining mule deer populations and recent research indicating the role of transitional ranges in supporting healthy populations, Wyoming Game and Fish Department (WGFD) is beginning a habitat treatment plan with the Kemmerer Field Office of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) that seeks to improve habitat quality for mule deer and other animals. This proposed project will provide baseline information on changes in forage at regional scales, with science to inform structured decisions for the Kemmerer-Cokeville habitat treatment plan. First, we will assess and predict long term changes in forage important to supporting mule deer and elk in Wyoming and Montana that managers can use to direct resources regionally. At the local scale, we will predict changes in forage from planned treatments in aspen forests, mixed-mountain shrubs, and sagebrush communities, building on the baseline of change identified regionally and focusing on the likely impact on mule deer migration, fawning and summer ranges locations and elk calving, habitat use, and migration. This will add a multi-species perspective to specific habitat treatment decisions, including the role of invasive species. At the regional scale, we will evaluate changes in forage, specifically the timing of high quality forage availability during green-up, the quality of the forage, the quantity of forage, and spatial heterogeneity over the last 20-25 years. We will use remote sensing metrics shown to explain mule deer and elk fawning and calving locations, summer habitat use, and migration (NDVI, EVI, and derived metrics for IRG, start of spring, duration of spring, end of season, cumulative forage, and peak growing season). We will assess predictive models to evaluate the likely impact of continued changes in the absence of active management for forage metrics. Resulting reports and maps will summarize past and future changes in forage by watershed units, hunting areas and herd unit, and the associated uncertainty so that managers can evaluate forage changes most relevant to the components of ungulate ecology most important for their area. Second, for the focal treatment area, we will develop scenario-based predictions of the impacts on forage for combinations of preferred treatment alternatives and potential outcomes that address possible conditions such as drought, the range of variability in snow pack (e.g., early versus late start of spring, high versus low snowpack), and invasive species, and the likelihood of those conditions based on climate and forage predictive models. We will use an interactive approach with managers (at minimum WGFD and BLM) and other experts in phenology, sage systems, and ungulates to combine the best available models with local knowledge to focus these analyses to be useful for decision-making. Finally, we will use predicted forage to describe the effects of habitat treatment within areas important to mule deer fawning, seasonal use, and migration in the treatment area and to forecast the impacts to elk ecology calving, the movement and habitat use in seasonal ranges, and migration between seasonal ranges. We will use existing models describing these ungulate needs that connect predicted changes in forage to these components of mule deer and elk ecology. This joint project among USGS, WGFD, BLM, and University of Wyoming will serve as a framework for assessing the impacts of habitat treatment on wildlife. It will be an important example of an approach to assess vegetation treatments intended to help one species through the lens of climate change, invasive species and multiple species. Two reports and associate GIS layers will include 1) summaries by watershed, hunting area, and herd unit for past and future forage across MT and WY, 2) a map of cheatgrass in the treatment area, 3) maps and summaries of predicted treatment outcomes. |
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