NW-Interior Nevada time series (2018-2068) of potential habitat and 50-year change

Potential future greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) habitat restoration was projected (2018-2068) for three sage-grouse Priority Area for Conservation (PACs) populations located along the northwestern, central, and eastern edge of the Great Basin using outputs from a spatially explicit state-transition simulation model (STSM) developed for sagebrush ecosystems. These datasets, for the NW-Interior Nevada, USA (NWINV) sage-grouse population, include: 1) a set of 78 categorical raster layers illustrating a time series (decade intervals) of potential future habitat, and 2) a set of 15 uncategorized raster layers illustrating potential change in habitat classification across space, after simulating 50 years of five different post-fire sagebrush revegetation restoration actions. The habitat layers generated illustrate spatial and temporal variation in potential future habitat, and the potential for change from revegetation actions aimed at restoration of sagebrush and perennial grass cover conditions across the NWINV landscape. These layers identify areas of potential future habitat (suitable, marginally suitable, unsuitable) and change in habitat condition classification (improvement, deterioration, no change) following post-fire revegetation actions (seeding, planting).
The STSM represented the vegetation dynamics of sagebrush-steppe systems and included annual fires, annual grass invasion, conifer encroachment, and sagebrush revegetation restoration. The STSM was built using the Syncrosim software ST-Sim (stsim) platform with use of the stock-flow (stsimsf) submodel to simulate and track continuous vegetation component cover changes caused by annual growth, natural regeneration, and post-fire sagebrush seeding and planting restoration. Thirteen restoration scenarios representing a combination of three revegetation alternatives (no restoration, seeding, planting) under three effort levels (average, double, maximum), and two durations (single-year, multi-year) were simulated for each PAC landscape. Planting scenarios represented the sagebrush cover gains of planting 4 plants/m2 (low-density; LD planting) and 8 plants/m2 (high-density; HD planting). The NW-Interior Nevada PAC represented an at-risk of increased annual-grass invasion landscape with high amounts of annual grass invaded sagebrush shrubland (10% of landscape) and annual grasslands (7% of landscape). Simulated vegetation output was compared with sage-grouse perennial grass and sagebrush cover habitat needs to evaluate trajectories of potential habitat and potential for change in habitat classification after 50 years of recursive fire and the five best restoration scenarios of each type (no restoration, seeding, LD planting, HD planting, multi-year).

Tags: biota, centrocercus-urophasianus, environment, greater-sage-grouse, nevada, nw-interior-nevada-priority-area-for-conservation, perennial-grass-cover, post-fire-restoration, sage-grouse-habitat, sagebrush-biome, sagebrush-cover, sagebrush-revegetation, state-and-transition-simulation-model, united-states, usgs-644978c6d34ee8d4aded9348, vegetation-change
Organization: Department of the Interior