Land Management

Natural climatic variability, including episodic droughts, has long been known to trigger accelerated tree mortality in forests worldwide, including in the Southwest U.S. Scientific understanding of the process drivers and spatial patterns of tree mortality is surprisingly limited, constraining our ability to model forest responses to projected climate changes. The onset of regional drought since...

High-severity crown fires in Southwestern dry-conifer forests — resulting from fire suppression, fuel buildups, and drought — are creating large treeless areas that are historically unprecedented in size. These recent stand-replacing fires have reset extensive portions of Southwest forest landscapes, fostering post-fire successional vegetation that can alter ecological recovery trajectories away...

The Wyoming Landscape Conservation Initiative (WLCI) addresses effects of land-use and climate changes on Southwest Wyoming’s natural resources. In partnership with twelve Federal, State, and local natural resource agencies, and non-governmental organizations– FORT and ten other USGS centers are conducting dozens of integrated science projects to assess the status of Southwest Wyoming’s natural...

This goal of this study is to develop a spatially explicit habitat-population modeling framework to assess the viability of Gunnison Sage-grouse and each of the seven populations (Gunnison Basin and six satellite populations).

Wild horse populations often increase at high rates on U.S. western rangelands, which in turn can lead to habitat degradation. The U.S. Geological Survey and the Bureau of Land Management are cooperating on studies investigating the potential of fertility control drugs to reduce foaling rates. In addition, because nearly every management issue concerning wild horses depends on accurate herd counts...

Ecological flow is a central theme of AS Branch studies, as our research examines how water flows affect populations, communities, ecosystems, and hydroscapes. Our studies elucidate the interactions among hydrologic, geomorphologic, biogeochemical, biological, and anthropogenic processes. Branch scientists identify and quantify the spatial and temporal attributes of water flow for ecological needs...

It is a difficult task to determine the desirable environmental targets for aquatic resource managers, because of a myriad of physical, hydrological, and biological processes affecting aquatic ecosystems and hydroscapes, the complexity of interactions and the multifaceted information, and substantial levels of uncertainty. Computer-based Decision Support Systems (DSS) can help integrate and...

As the need for incorporating biological objectives into water management decisions has grown, so has the need for methods and metrics to incorporate predictions of relevant biological responses into an increasingly complex decision environment that attempts to balance multiple uses.

Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) are an emerging technology which may result in safer and improved methods to conduct wildlife surveys. The objective of this task is to test the capabilities of various cameras and sensors onboard a small Unoccupied (or unmanned) Aircraft System (sUAS) to determine if they are a useful and effective tool to inventory various flora and fauna important to USGS...

Mountain ecosystems of the western U.S. provide irreplaceable goods and services such as water, wood, biodiversity, and recreational opportunities, but their potential responses to projected climatic patterns are poorly understood. The overarching objective of the Western Mountain Initiative (WMI) is to understand and predict the responses—emphasizing sensitivities, thresholds, resistance, and...

The wild horses that roam the west are feral descendents of domestic animals that either escaped from or were intentionally released by early European explorers and later settlers. As a result of both origin and contemporary management, the Spanish or Iberian influence remains strong in some wild horse populations (e.g., the Kiger, Pryor Mountain, and Sulfur Mountain herds). In other populations...

Landscape genetics is a recently developed discipline that involves the merger of molecular population genetics and landscape ecology. The goal of this new field of study is to provide information about the interaction between landscape features and microevolutionary processes such as gene flow, genetic drift, and selection allowing for the understanding of processes that generate genetic...