The predominant way that wildlife conservation is practiced today, rescuing species one at a time from the brinks of extinction, is no longer tenable. Species are being proposed for endangered or threatened status faster than we can gather information about their needs and devise conservation plans for them. The scale and complexity of the challenges we face require strategic, multi-species conservation at scales that match the threats. A solution proposed to deal with this problem is to plan to conserve whole landscapes along with the habitats, functions and processes within them that can sustain the species that are reliant upon them. One approach is to strategically select a few of the species with the most demanding requirements, and design landscape conservation around their needs, under the assumption that providing for the needs of the most demanding (resource limited) species will meet the needs of less demanding species. I propose to test this hypothesis by testing whether implementing existing conservation plans for sage-grouse will sustain obligate vertebrate species co-occurring in the sagebrush steppe landscapes of North America.
Results/Conclusions
I will determine the resource requirements of the co-occurring, obligate species in the landscape, using available survey data to build models that approximate spatially-explicit population viability for these species. This will be used to determine whether the sage-grouse conservation plans can sustain these species populations, or whether additional landscape elements need to be conserved, and what, where and how much more may be needed. I anticipate that using conservation requirements of one species, the sage grouse, will not be sufficient to sustain the other obligate species in the sagebrush steppe landscape. So, I will use the spatially-explicit viability models for the other obligate species to determine a minimum set of species that together will form a conservation umbrella, sustaining all of the terrestrial vertebrate species in this landscape. I will also run the models using changes to the landscape predicted from climate change and development and determine whether the conservation plan based on the suite of umbrella species is robust to these anticipated changes or the anticipated landscape changes need to be explicitly incorporated into the models at the outset.