A new tool from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department (WGFD) will identify and rank 114 clusters of sage grouse based on population trends.
The tool, called sage grouse cluster ordering by unified trend assessment or SCOUT, draws from population and abundance data spanning 25 years. Clusters represent sage grouse “neighborhoods.” They’re organized by leks, which are grouse breeding grounds.
Nyssa Whitford is the sage grouse biologist with WGFD. She said the rankings will help focus conservation efforts.
“We’re ranking every cluster, so we’ll know how they stack up against each other,” said Whitford. “We’re going to be focusing on those opportunity clusters. These are areas where we feel that we can move the needle.”
Whitford said the tool is part of Wyoming’s adaptive management strategy with sage grouse, which was reiterated through an executive order signed by Gov. Mark Gordon last year and a new Bureau of Land Management plan. Whitford said this approach tracks sage grouse populations and habitats for early intervention.
“The goal of adaptive management is when something starts to kind of go sideways, we can quickly pull it back to where it needs to be,” said Whitford.
Sage grouse live their entire lives in the sagebrush sea: The plant is an important food source and habitat. They are especially vulnerable to the threat of habitat fragmentation.
“Anything that’s kind of inhibiting that life cycle, they just do not respond favorably to it,” said Whitford. “They need the intact sagebrush sea to survive.”
Whitford explained that unbroken, quiet tracts of sagebrush are also critical to the springtime mating displays of sage grouse, called “lekking.”
“It’s a very visual and acoustic display,” said Whitford. “It’s very quiet out there, and so you can really get to hear all the pieces of the mating display. There’s like these pops and the swishing of the wings.”
The best time to observe lekking across Wyoming is in April.
The output from the SCOUT tool will be used to create a report that addresses questions about clusters of concern.
Whitford provided examples of potential questions: “What does the habitat look like in that cluster? Has it changed? Is it more fragmented? Has there been new development? Has there been a wildfire recently?”
The output and report will be shared with a working group made up of representatives from different agencies and industries, who will use the findings to guide conservation efforts.
Whitford said WGFD has been monitoring leks since the 1940s and codified those efforts in the 1990s, but SCOUT offers a new and more consistent way to study all the data.
“Wyoming cares deeply about its sage grouse populations and really wants to make sure all the entities involved, whether they’re managing the landscape or they’re managing the population, are on the same page and moving forward in the same direction,” said Whitford.
