Understanding Pinon-Juniper Encroachment and Pinyon Jays for Grassland Management
Channel: Conservation and Adaptation Resources Toolbox
Date: 2023-05-05

Land managers do not have the tools they needed to map how Pinyon-Juniper woodland-grassland ecotones respond fire and other drivers of change. Furthermore, the habitat needs of Pinyon Jays, a species sustaining heavy population declines that is at-risk of listing as an endangered species, in the Pinyon-Juniper woodland and grassland ecosystems are poorly understood, impeding effective recovery actions. 

00:02:12 Tara Bishop (USGS) leads a team of scientists who build tools for fire management in fire-prone Pinyon-Juniper landscapes using Ecological Site Groups, monitoring data and machine learning. Tara’s group increases the utility of spatial decision tools by developing State and Transition Models based in an Ecological Sites framework that incorporate more robust fuels and fire data. Her team is mapping current conditions, attainable desired conditions, and departure from desired conditions based on end-user and scientific metrics.

00:19:05 Scott Somershoe (FWS) the Pinyon Jay Working Group and will discuss the group’s Pinyon Jay Conservation Strategy, survey protocols, and a forthcoming predictive occurrence model among other products. The relationship between pinon-juniper woodlands, the grassland-woodland ecotone, and conservation objectives for Pinyon Jays is complicated and poorly understood. With a holistic, landscape scale approach, multiple management objectives can likely be accomplished concurrently while minimizing impacts to, or potentially increased habitat quality for, Pinyon Jays, however research is needed.

00:34:13 Panel Discussion with Scott Somershoe (FWS), Tara Bishop (USGS), Valerie Foster (USFS), Steve Cassady (AZGFD), John Boone (GBBO), and Edwin Juarez (AZGFD)

Webinar from May 4th, 2023