Regional Sagebrush Conservation

The Sagebrush Conservation Design is a collaborative, west-wide effort to provide a roadmap for the conservation of the sagebrush biome. The SCD builds from concepts including Threat-Based Land Management and Threat-Based Ecostate mapping developed in Oregon and provides:

  • A call to action that recognizes that our collective efforts have resulted in many important local successes, but we need a new strategy beyond business-as-usual to stem the losses of functioning sagebrush steppe.

  • A proactive, landscape-scale framework to ‘Defend and Grow the Core’ by protecting the most intact sagebrush and working strategically across the landscape to increase those intact areas.

  • Spatial data layers to guide the strategy at a biome-wide level. See the SageCon Landscape Planning Tool for SCD layers in Oregon and threat-based ecostate maps that can help guide our efforts to defend and grow core sagebrush rangelands in Oregon.

The strategic, proactive concepts behind ‘Defend and Grow the Core’ can be applied at multiple scales. This example shows an area in Oregon containing large swaths of growth opportunity areas (light blue) as mapped in the Sagebrush Conservation Design. At the management-relevant scale of local landscapes or large allotments, threat-based ecostate maps help identify more localized ‘cores’ mapped as state A (dark green) and adjacent threats and growth opportunities. 

The SageCon Partnership works in concert with efforts in neighboring states and across the Great Basin. Some organizations that work across agencies throughout the west include:

  • The Western Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies (WAFWA) works on a range of natural resource issues in the western US, including a sagebrush conservation initiative. WAFWA shares many broad goals with the SageCon Partnership and partners and staff regularly participate in WAFWA working groups. WAFWA also hosts a biannual sage-grouse workshop.

  • The Western Governors Association (WGA) is launching a “Working Lands, Working Communities” program, which relates to the goals of the SageCon Partnership. The WGA launched an Invasive Grass Toolkit that articulates the concept of “Defend the Core, Grow the Core,” upon which the SageCon Invasives Initiatives geographic strategy is based.

  • Many SageCon partners have regional programs related to sagebrush conservation. See the SageCon Partners list for more information.