Saving Sagebrush: The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act Help Conserve the West

Sagebrush is iconic. Sagebrush is more than a rugged plant with silvery green leaves and an earthy aroma. It is a vast landscape, long important to Native American cultures, that has been interwoven into our larger national fabric and embodies the wide-open spaces of the West.

The sagebrush ecosystem - also known as the sagebrush biome or sagebrush sea - covers about 175 million acres, making it the largest contiguous ecosystem in the continental United States, comprising one-third of the land mass of the lower 48 states. It supports some 350 wildlife species, from pollinators and tiny lizards to enormous elk and bison, not to mention millions of resident and migratory birds including the greater sage-grouse. Its soils store carbon, keeping the greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere. Sagebrush is essential habitat at the headwaters of major rivers, including the Columbia, the Missouri, and the Colorado (a water source for millions of Arizonans and Southern Californians).

Yet sagebrush is threatened by prolonged drought, the catastrophic cycle of invasive grasses and wildfire, among other disturbances.

Thanks to funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act the Department of the Interior is working to conserve the sagebrush ecosystem and combat these threats through the Sagebrush Keystone Initiative.

Learn about the ways the Department is working to conserve this American treasure:

Providing Science for Land Managers

The sagebrush biome occupies only 50 percent of its historical range. More than a million acres per year of sagebrush are disappearing. Major threats are invasive plant species (notably cheatgrass), which overwhelm native sagebrush and fuel an increase in climate-change-and-drought-related wildfires; human settlement; conversion to agriculture; livestock overgrazing; and conifer tree and shrub encroachment.

In response, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, along with other partners, developed the Sagebrush Conservation Design (SCD), a tool to identify the remaining healthy, intact sagebrush core landscapes and opportunities for their growth. SCD provides a data-driven framework to guide land managers' decisions on protecting healthy sagebrush habitat and restoring degraded sagebrush. The USGS also tracks outcomes of those decisions.

Lief Wiechman - a USGS sagebrush ecosystem specialist and Sagebrush Keystone Initiative chair - sees his bureau's role as, "How can we help managers doing the on-the-ground work do their job cheaper, better, more efficiently?"

Working With Landowners

Since 2022, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has funded approximately 200 habitat restoration projects through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. One is the Wyoming Invasive Annual Grass Management Collaborative, a partnership with the state of Wyoming, Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes and others, to control invasive annual grass and defend high-quality sagebrush habitat.

Through the Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program, the two tribes and about a dozen major private landowners participating in the collaborative agree voluntarily to manage their land in a sagebrush-friendly manner, in exchange for financial help and conservation guidance from USFWS. The tribes occupy 1.98 million acres, and the landowners cumulatively own about 150,000 acres.

Tim Kramer, the state coordinator for the Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program, notes that Wyoming has "some of the best of the best intact sagebrush-steppe habitat" remaining in North America.

To prevent invasive annual grasses from getting a stronghold (and thus fueling devastating wildfires) and to promote sagebrush and perennial grass growth, herbicide that kills invasive grasses is applied aerially on participants' lands. USFWS biologist Dave Kimble says Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding has helped the collaborative "increase the pace and scale of the ongoing annual grass control." He estimates this funding has enabled 25,000 acres to be treated with herbicide so far, and 50,000 more acres will be in the future.

Containing Conifer Trees and Shrubs

Along the Missouri River in north-central Montana, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is using the USGS Sagebrush Conservation Design to defend core sagebrush-grassland habitat and stop the spread of ponderosa pine trees and juniper shrubs. These conifers deplete scarce water, decrease land's livestock grazing value, and shade out sagebrush.

Through a Hi-Line Sagebrush Anchor Restoration Landscape project, BLM is leading a partnership to remove overgrown conifers from about 20,000 acres of public and private land over 10 years to improve greater sage-grouse habitat. "This project wouldn't have existed without the IRA funding," says project manager Matt Comer. Additional funding is expected from the BIL and Montana Grassland Partnership members, too.

To restore sagebrush and grassland, selected conifers are cut with chainsaws or loppers and scattered or, in thicker areas, masticated (ground completely).

Of sagebrush, Comer says, "For a long time, I think it was underappreciated and undervalued." Over the past century, it has been mowed, burnt, converted to agriculture, and built upon. "We're just trying to conserve what's there and keep it functioning," he says, for the benefit of wildlife and people.

Defending and Growing the Core of the Sagebrush Biome

The National Park Service (NPS) is focused on making the 3 million acres of sagebrush it manages more resilient to climate change. At Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve in Idaho, NPS is preserving sagebrush along U.S. Highway 26, which runs through the park.

"Sagebrush is a landscape and environment that provides a lot of value - value we're still working to understand - to the native systems, but also to the people who live here and the people who make a living on the land," says Linda Manning, chief of natural resources at Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve.

Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funds are also helping limit invasive grasses that have taken root and replanting sagebrush on wildfire-scarred land in Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve. The NPSage initiative is supported by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law as well as other special helpers - mules. Typically, people carry three or four gallons of herbicide in backpacks to manually spray herbicide to control the grasses. In this case, mules carried 24 gallons of herbicide across 200 acres, so NPS staff were able to cover more ground. This project will restore 10,000 more acres along the highway, where visitors can see intact sagebrush up close.

"As far as the Park Service's contribution to the broader strategy to defend and grow the core of the sagebrush biome, Craters of the Moon is the place," says Tom Rodhouse, an NPS ecologist who specializes in sagebrush. "The amount of healthy sagebrush land there is greater than what we have in all our other parks combined."

Partners in Sagebrush Conservation

Partners supporting the Department's sagebrush conservation work include:

• State and local governments,
• Native American tribes,
• The Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies,
• The Intermountain West Joint Venture,
• The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation,
• The Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Services,
• The Nature Conservancy,
• Local conservation districts,
• County weed and pest districts,
• and hundreds of private landowners.

"Not everyone may appreciate just how valuable this country is," says USFWS sagebrush ecosystem coordinator Matt Kales. To anyone who, from a car or plane window, sees sagebrush as wasteland, he says: "From wildlife and tribal lifeways to water resources and energy to food and fiber, this is a vital place, one worth fighting for."

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