Sage-Grouse and Wildfire: Fire's Toll on Sagebrush Habitat

Little was left standing after the Soda Fire burned nearly 200,000 acres of sage-grouse habitat in southwestern Idaho and southeastern Oregon in August 2015. BLM/Antonia Hedrick.

The greater sage-grouse depends on healthy sagebrush country, and wildfire is one of the gravest threats to it. The plans the Bureau of Land Management has followed since 2015 to manage sage-grouse habitat on public lands name fire as the main threat in the Great Basin — Utah, Nevada, northeastern California, Oregon and Idaho — and a lesser but still widespread one in the Rocky Mountain region of Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas and northwest Colorado.

How much has been lost

Monitoring shows that fire caused 72 percent of all sage-grouse habitat lost between 2012 and 2018. In the Great Basin states the figure was 87 percent; in the Rocky Mountain region, about a third (34 percent).

Not every burned acre stops working as habitat, and five or six years are too few to set firm trends, but the share of burned acres that are sage-grouse habitat is a place to start. Since 2015, 13 percent of all the acres burned in the United States have been sage-grouse habitat — as much as 24 percent in 2018, and as little as 3 percent in 2022, on preliminary figures.

National totals include states with no sage-grouse at all, such as Alaska, which often has big fire years. In the 11 states that do have habitat, 23 percent of all acres burned from 2016 through 2022 were sage-grouse habitat. The peak came in 2019, when more than 41 percent were; the lowest was 2021, under 7 percent.

Wildland fire and sage-grouse habitat in the 11 states with habitat, 2016–2022 (2022 preliminary, as of November 30, 2022). Bureau of Land Management.

The BLM manages the largest share of the remaining habitat, about 45 percent. In the first three years of the current plans, 2016 to 2018, the BLM's share of the habitat that burned was roughly in line with that. It then fell for three years, before rising to nearly half again in 2022.

Why fire keeps coming back

Fire does lasting damage even where habitat survives, because burned ground is more easily invaded by cheatgrass and other non-native plants. They crowd out the native grasses, forbs and sagebrush that sage-grouse need for food and cover — and they burn more readily and more fiercely than native vegetation, making the land more likely to burn again.

Invasive cheatgrass burns more readily and intensely than native grasses and forbs. BLM/Mike Pellant.

What the BLM is doing

The BLM is re-examining its 2015 sage-grouse plans through an environmental impact statement. Fire data and information on habitat condition are central to it. The review will look at what makes habitat burn, how drought and climate change may be raising the risk of fires that destroy it, and whether fuel breaks and fuel reduction in the Great Basin are reducing how often, how fiercely and how destructively fires burn.

Sources

• Bureau of Land Management, "Sage-grouse x Wildland Fire"; rewritten in hubnx's own words, with data as of November 30, 2022. Photographs and charts from the BLM; the lead photograph, credited to a photographer outside the agency, is left out.