January 2022

The interagency group developing a comprehensive Sagebrush Conservation Strategy (SCS) reported to the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (WAFWA) Directors at their recent meeting that the draft of Part II of the strategy will be released for review in early February, 2022. Part I of the strategy was published in early 2021 and discussed in a previous edition of the Outdoor News Bulletin. Part I addressed the importance of the sagebrush biome to people and wildlife, the extent and impacts of change agents affecting the biome, and identified conservation needs. Part II will lay out strategies that partners in sagebrush conservation can use to achieve the vision of “a sagebrush landscape with native understory that creates a large, functioning, intact biome.” In addition to the agency and public review, the draft SCS will undergo rigorous peer review before publication by the U.S. Geological Survey later this year.

The USGS Arkansas Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit is leading new research on restoring prairie grasslands with prescribed burning in the Loess Canyons of Nebraska. Private landowners have used prescribed burning for nearly two decades to address the greatest threat to their working grasslands, the expansion of trees into grasslands (woody encroachment). This is the first study showing how long-term management across an entire region or ecosystem can reverse the impacts that trees have on grasslands and on birds that depend on intact, resilient, and tree-free grasslands.