GILLETTE, Wyo. — Nearly $10 million has been allocated to support dozens of strategic projects in the West focused on bolstering habitat restoration and community resiliency in the face of changing climate, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Per Fish and Wildlife, the funding comes through President Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and will be used to support 53 strategic projects in the western states focused on habitat restoration and on-the-ground science. The projects will support the management of invasive grasses, reduce wildfire risks, remove conifers and restore sagebrush habitat.
“It’s more important than ever to improve landscape resilience by managing invasive annual grasses and safeguarding water resources throughout sagebrush country to address impacts from climate change and increased wildfires,” Service Director Martha Williams said in a statement. “These shovel-ready projects are addressing the highest priority threats to sagebrush ecosystem health and improving watershed integrity both in this arid landscape and downstream to support the people and wildlife who call this area home.”
Part of those projects fall under the Sagebrush Keystone Initiative, which all focus on restoring core sagebrush area and answer biome-level threats that have dramatically degraded and converted sage landscapes and include prolonged drought, pinyon-juniper encroachment and a catastrophic cycle of invasive grasses and wildfire, according to Fish and Wildlife.
A 2022 U.S. Geological Survey report found an average of 1.3 million acres of sagebrush have been lost or degraded each year over the last 20 years.
Per the initiative, the U.S. Department of the Interior’s bureaus and offices are working together with Tribal, state and private partners to implement a “Defend the Core, Grow the Core” approach.
Through the initiative’s planned approach, land managers will look first at defending intact cores of sagebrush that provide essential ecosystem services to wildlife and people including desirable forage for domestic livestock, the availability of critical water supplies and habitat for migrating and wintering big game.
Additionally, the approach focuses on growing core areas by restoring more degraded areas to help maintain healthy Western landscapes while identifying additional opportunities for landscape-scale restoration investments, according to DOI.
Per the initiative, the implementation approach will make strategic restoration investments from across DOI’s bureaus and offices in identified Sagebrush Collaborative Restoration Landscapes.
In the Wyoming region, the restoration landscape covers the southwest portions of the state and extends into northeast Utah, comprising 7.9 million acres of Core Sagebrush and Growth Opportunity Areas, according to USGS.
The landscape is anchored in the Upper Green River Basin and the Upper Bear River Watershed. It also includes the high-elevation Red Desert region of south-central Wyoming, intersecting with BLM’s Muddy Creek, La Barge and Upper Bear River Restoration Landscapes.