National Parks Have Lost 75% of Their Good Sagebrush Habitat Since 1998

Picture shrubland rolling to the horizon, like the backdrop of an old western, and — if you're lucky — a male sage grouse puffing himself up in a showy display for potential mates. That landscape is disappearing. Since 1998, U.S. national parks have lost 75 percent of their good-quality sagebrush habitat, and national wildlife refuges have lost 25 percent — more than 500,000 acres in all of the West's largest, most iconic and most imperiled landscape.

Sagebrush and flowering blue flax at Fossil Butte National Monument. Credit: John Collins, National Park Service.

Protect the core

Those figures come from a study published in the November 2024 issue of Rangeland Ecology & Management. Its authors argue that protecting sagebrush works better when it is strategic — guided by what careful observation shows — than when choices are made at random.

Their tool is the Sagebrush Conservation Design, a plan for deciding how to protect and grow "core" sagebrush areas: large, intact, relatively undisturbed sagebrush habitat that is expected to withstand the impacts of a changing climate.

Why it matters for parks

Money for conservation is scarce. The study shows how using the design has helped some parks put scarce federal dollars where they will have the most impact, by protecting and growing those core areas.

Sources

Based on "To Save the American West's Most Iconic Landscape, It Pays to Be Strategic," by the editors of Park Science, Volume 39, Number 1 (Winter 2024–25), "Research Roundup," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The study: Sparklin and others, 2024, "An Assessment of Conservation Opportunities Within Sagebrush Ecosystems of US National Parks and Wildlife Refuges," Rangeland Ecology & Management 97: 94–106.