Threat-Based Strategic Conservation
The Sagebrush Conservation Design issues a call to action for strategic, landscape-scale management to conserve the sagebrush biome across the western US. It promotes a proactive framework to strategically defend and grow intact core sagebrush rangelands, which can be applied at scales ranging from the biome level to local landscapes. SageCon Partners from Oregon State University, the Institute for Natural Resources, and the Agricultural Research Service developed Threat-Based Strategic Conservation (TBSC) to help local groups defend and grow the core at management-relevant scales, empowering managers and practitioners to conduct proactive, strategic landscape management within their area of influence. TBSC builds upon a solid foundation of existing work, including the Sagebrush Conservation Design, Defend and Grow the Core, and Threat-Based Land Management .
Threat Based Strategic Conservation includes a variety of integrated planning processes, described in the sections below. The Conservation Readiness Framework helps mid-level collaborative groups (e.g., sage-grouse local implementation teams) narrow in on geographies that are ripe for developing a TBSC spatial strategy, including a process to inventory social and administrative conditions to assess whether an area is “ready” to implement conservation actions identified in the spatial strategy. TBSC Spatial Strategy workshops consist of multiple hands-on interactive activities which facilitate landscape-scale, proactive planning in complex local landscapes. The TBSC lens can also be applied to Post-Fire Planning, to inform strategic deployment of limited resources and make difficult rehabilitation decisions immediately after fire. As the threat of wildfire increases, TBSC continues to evolve to meet emerging needs by adapting and tailoring spatial strategies to consider pre-fire planning.
Conservation Readiness Framework
The Where, Who, and How of strategic conservation
The “defend and grow the core” concept emphasizes that limited conservation resources should be used to maintain core areas and strategically grow such areas where possible. However, conservation action in core areas may not be immediately possible due to existing social and administrative conditions. It’s important to consider “Where” conservation is likely to make a difference and be successful, and what must occur to address threats and support ecosystem integrity. “Where” isn’t just a place; it’s a combination of social and administrative conditions that exist or will need to be created for a TBSC approach to be actionable.
The Conservation Readiness Framework (Wollstein et al. 2024) helps collaborative groups and management planners identify geographies of “conservation readiness”. These are areas that have a combination of conditions that indicate areas that are ripe (or have the potential to become ripe) for implementing strategic conservation. Each of these conditions: ecological importance, social capacity, and conducive administrative conditions, are mappable and help guide what types of work may need to occur in specific areas, now or in the future. Conservation readiness occurs in areas where the three conditions overlap on a map— in places of ecological importance, where there is social capacity for collective work to occur, and conducive administrative conditions. The framework not only elucidates areas ripe for immediate action in overlapping circles, but also helps identify where and what conditions must be created or bolstered so action is possible in areas of ecological importance.
Threat Based Strategic Conservation Spatial Planning
A hands-on process to defend and grow the core at local landscape scales
Threat-Based Strategic Conservation (TBSC) spatial strategy workshops were inspired by the need to empower and equip collaborative groups with science and tools to strategically and proactively manage sagebrush rangelands at local scales. This spatial planning process is meant for focal landscapes (generally 200,000-500,000 acres in size) where management planners are currently working or have prioritized work using the Conservation Readiness Framework described above. TBSC is a hands-on, interactive workshop model to facilitate landscape-scale, proactive planning in complex local landscapes with multiple stakeholders and values - recognizing that a roadmap is needed to help managers and practitioners apply “defend and grow the core” concepts in their day-to-day work. SageCon has been helping facilitate workshops with local collaborative groups in Oregon and beyond, with the goal of helping our partners develop their own science-informed but locally-derived spatial strategy to defend and grow the core.
Framed within the context of “conservation readiness” (see above), the workshops ground participants in background, context, and principles for strategic management and then walk through a hands-on, interactive activity for a group of stakeholders. The process attempts to pair the most relevant information (a carefully curated list of concepts, principles, and geospatial tools) with the most relevant audiences (multi-stakeholder groups who are making decisions about where and how to work on the ground) and create a space for these groups to wrestle with how to apply these big concepts in the real world.
Although each group is unique, basic components of the interactive activity include:
1) mapping locally relevant core sagebrush areas, growth opportunity areas, and other rangelands based on ecostate maps of broad ecological condition
2) identifying major threats to these areas (e.g., core sagebrush areas with lowest resilience to wildfire).
3) narrow the decision space by dividing the landscape into smaller subunits based on threats and values of interest (e.g., sage-grouse or other wildlife habitat) to identify areas of importance to stakeholders. The resulting map will subdivide a large landscape into units based on management goals and threats.
4) define the relative urgency of management actions in each spatial unit given ecological integrity, values, the urgency and importance of threats present, and likelihood of success.
Threat-Based Strategic Conservation to inform Post-Fire Planning
After landscapes have burned in wildfires, difficult decisions must be made about where to direct recovery efforts and the actions that will promote resistance to annual grasses and, ultimately, restore a functional sagebrush ecosystem.
TBSC-informed post-fire planning offers a framework for making management decisions and focusing limited resources across burned rangelands. Focusing on impacted rangelands prone to annual grass invasion, the planning framework extends and makes actionable “defend the core, grow the core” principles in a post-fire environment where management decisions are both urgent and important. The post-fire planning framework uses 5 categories—anchor, maintain, improve, contain, and monitor—to equip producers and agency and county staff involved in post-fire rehabilitation decisions with a spatial strategy that can be used to inform strategic selection of management actions on an individual ranch or across large, multi-jurisdictional landscapes.
See the post-fire resources webpage for additional post-fire resources and a recorded webinar that walks through this process in a real landscape.
