Click the link to read the article on the USDA website (Jocelyn Benjamin):

June 13, 2024

A new study reveals that managing habitat for songbirds like the golden-winged warbler also benefits insect pollinators like the at-risk monarch butterfly.

Exploring the young forests and shrublands within the eastern deciduous forests of the United States, this study, which was highlighted in a Science to Solutions report by the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, thoroughly unravels the co-benefits that managing for early-successional habitat offers to both the golden-winged warbler and monarch butterfly. Managing for forest-age diversity improves the overall long-term health of forest communities and wildlife habitat. This research will help USDA strengthen conservation solutions for the Monarch butterfly and other pollinators.

Common management solutions promoting early-successional communities like shrublands and young forests, are expensive, due to the management tools needed to simulate natural disturbances like wildfire, beaver activity, and severe weather that revert older sites to early-successional young forest conditions. 

To combat these challenges, USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) offers cost-effective management tools and technical assistance to private landowners through the Working Lands for Wildlife (WLFW) initiative.

WLFW offers management planning to improve forest stand quality and structure while promoting conservation benefits for specific wildlife species, which may also impact non-focal species. In this case, the golden-winged warbler is a focal species for multiple NRCS working lands programs in the Appalachian Mountains and Great Lakes, and shares common habitat goals with pollinators, including butterflies and native bees.

The report outlines several recent studies that assessed how pollinator species respond to avian-focused early successional habitat management in the Great Lakes and provides evidence that breeding habitat management efforts for the Warbler not only benefit pollinators but also many other non-focal species of conservation concern, including the American Woodcock and Eastern Whip-poor-will.

The monarch butterfly populations have declined significantly over the past few decades due to critical population stressors, including reductions in milkweed and nectar plant availability, driven by the loss and degradation of habitat across its range. 

This drastic decline has sparked concerted efforts to create and enhance monarch habitat. The studies found that abundant blooming plants within forested landscapes, with emergent herbaceous wetlands nearby, combine habitat components for pollinators by containing pollen and nectar at a single site. Given that many disturbance-dependent flowering herbaceous plants like goldenrod colonize recently managed golden-winged warbler sites, coupling insect pollinators with warbler habitat creation benefits multiple species.

NRCS continues to offer this multispecies benefits approach through its working lands initiative, which nets a win-win for songbirds, pollinators, and owners and operators of working forests.

Learn more about NRCS conservation outcomes for the golden-winged warbler by watching “Outcomes from NRCS Golden-Winger Warbler Conservation Efforts” or how NRCS can help you create or enhance habitat for monarch butterflies on your working lands.

More Information:

NRCS will host a free, one-hour Conservation Outcomes Webinar during National Pollinator Week that shares findings on the value of voluntary conservation practices to support pollinators nationwide. Additional details are available on the Conservation Outcomes Webinar Series webpage.

Click the link to read the article on the Writers on the Range website (Stephen Trimble):

January 15, 2024

The long drive between Salt Lake City, Utah and Reno, Nevada on Interstate 80 feels endless, the landscape timeless. But these basins and ranges of the Great Basin Desert are changing dramatically.

Wildfire, climate change and aridification are transforming plant communities, while animals, including humans, try to figure out how to respond. Meanwhile, the dwindling Great Salt Lake risks becoming a toxic dust bowl.

Sagebrush now covers only half the territory it did before European settlers arrived with their livestock in the 1800s. Exotic annual grasses, including cheatgrass, have increased eightfold here since 1990, accelerating the fire cycle, outcompeting native plants and decreasing the available forage for grazers, wild and domestic. 

I called this place “the sagebrush ocean” when I first wrote about it in the 1980s. Now, scientists mourn the loss of 1.3 million acres of healthy sagebrush each year, threatening animals that need sagebrush, like the Greater Sage Grouse and pygmy rabbit. Recent photographs of Nevada and Utah West Desert basins document a cheatgrass sea.

Researchers and federal lands staffers chant the management mantra for sagebrush ecosystems: “identify the core, protect the core, grow the core, mitigate impacts.”

But what is this dwindling core? Think intact ecosystems with abundant sagebrush and native understory, with minimal threats from invasive grasses, encroaching conifers or modification by people. Not much land fitting that description is left.

The core that’s left is rare and vulnerable. Although the Intermountain West is no longer the exclusive domain of the livestock industry, grazing continues to affect more acres than any other human use. Large expanses of sagebrush with grasses and wildflowers eaten down to nubs by cattle do not constitute “restoration.”

That is why land managers are hard put to save threatened animals that need sagebrush, like the greater sage grouse and pygmy rabbit.

But the dilemma is this: Saving sagebrush puts the aromatic shrublands at odds with piñon-juniper woodland—a landscape just as beloved, just as vital. Range ecologists believe that growing the sagebrush core means that half of the Great Basin woodlands need “treatment”—removing younger stands of trees while retaining old growth forest. Treatment means ripping the trees from the earth with a chain stretched between bulldozers or “masticating” trees to shreds.

A spree of “treatments” approved at the end of the Trump administration in 2020 opened millions of acres of woodland in the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau to destruction. I happened upon one such project in the Kern Mountains of easternmost Nevada last summer, where a crew had been contracted to thin a dense woodland. The crew created a firebreak, but I felt I’d entered a war zone, with the scattered corpses of hundreds of trees littering newly cleared ground.

Before 1860, two-thirds of Great Basin landscapes in woodland habitat were treeless. Today, less than one-third is treeless, as trees decrease the acreage and vitality of sagebrush. But it’s unclear if sagebrush animals will repopulate cleared habitat anytime soon.

No more than half of tree treatments result in the regrowth of native grasses. Meanwhile, flocks of Pinyon Jays that depend on the trees suffer steep declines.

Here’s the rub: both sagebrush and woodland landscapes harbor incredible biodiversity. Piñon or sagebrush—which matters most? To sage grouse, pygmy rabbits and piñon mice? To backcountry recreationists, to cattlemen? To Indigenous Great Basin Washoe, Paiute and Shoshone people—citizens of what ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan calls “Piñon Nut Nation?”

When you live in a piñon-juniper woodland, you live with the trees, not under them. “Tree” usually means tall, vertical, but these trees often are round, comforting. I have enormous affection for the “p-j,” my home territory. Yet who doesn’t love the smell of sagebrush after a rain and cherish its native wildlife?

As sweeping change comes to the Great Basin, federal managers need to address causes, not symptoms. Their challenge is huge: to confront invading cheatgrass and junipers and reverse the decline of sagebrush, nut harvests, native grass and birds. All this, while ensuring that mule deer and cows flourish.

If we want to heal the land and restore the balance between sagebrush and woodland, we need to treat these landscapes as we would with those we love—using every bit of wisdom from both western and Indigenous traditions for the benefit of our collective future. 

Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West, writersontherange.org. A 35^th anniversary edition of his book, The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin, will be published this year.

Click the link to read the article on the WyoFile website (Mike Koshmrl):

Vegetation ecologists monitoring the latest mountain pine beetle epidemic fear for the survival of the Teton Range’s remaining ancient whitebark pine stands. 

A keystone species that gained Endangered Species Act protections early this year, whitebark pines were hit hard by a plague of mountain pine beetles that spanned from 2004 to 2012. 

A cold snap ended that wave, giving the region’s embattled whitebark pine a temporary reprieve. Four years ago, however, scientists monitoring the gnarled high-elevation conifers started to see a larger concentration of “brood trees” harboring increasing numbers of the bark-boring insects. 

“It’s just another beetle epidemic happening because they are not being slowed down by cold falls and springs — like they naturally were before,” said Nancy Bockino, a Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative whitebark pine field ecologist who has long monitored the species in Grand Teton National Park. “And it’s getting worse.” 

Bockino wrote about the ongoing infestation in a publication called Nutcracker Notes, which is produced by the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation. Her paper was ominously titled — “Here we go again: The mountain pine beetle is killing our remaining old whitebark” — and in the article she referred to the repeat epidemic as a “grave situation.”

“First,” Bockino wrote, “the loss of any of the few remaining cone-bearing whitebark is a significant setback for conservation and restoration.” 

Moreover, she added, “a second epidemic may result in so few whitebark pine that the delicate and obligate mutualism between the tree and the Clark’s Nutcracker could collapse.”

The Clark’s Nutcracker is a species of jay that whitebark pine depends upon to disperse its seeds. But dependency in the relationship is not entirely mutual: nutcrackers can subsist on other pine seeds when whitebark seed stocks are poor. In its rule listing whitebark pine as a threatened species, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wrote that climate change could negatively affect nutcracker populations, potentially exacerbating whitebark decline. 

The Tetons and Wind River Range have historically been bright spots for whitebark pine conservation within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. 

Whitebark pine seeds are a major food source for grizzly bears, and during the height of the 2004-to-2012 epidemic, beetle-killed whitebark monitored by the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team amounted to 76% of all the trees being monitored. A higher percentage survived in Grand Teton National Park, however. 

Bockino and others surveyed Teton Range whitebark pine in 2022 to try to get a grip on the scope of the epidemic. They found that 54% of the overstory was dead from pine beetles. Just more than a third of those dead trees — 35% — showed signs of beetle attack between 2019 and 2022.

The reemergent threat from mountain pine beetles is also hitting whitebark hard in other southern swaths of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Increasing beetle activity has been observed in the Wyoming, Salt River and Wind River Ranges and at sites on the Caribou-Targhee National Forest, according to Bockino. 

Unlike the nonnative fungus blister rust — another threat to whitebark pine persistence — mountain pine beetles are a native species that the long-lived tree evolved alongside. What’s changed and made pine beetles an existential threat are the survival rates of the bark-boring insect. Extreme cold in the spring and fall can knock back beetle populations, but the subzero temperatures needed for beetle die-offs are happening evermore infrequently as the climate warms. 

In the rule establishing whitebark pine as “threatened” under the ESA, the Fish and Wildlife Service used 60-year intervals between outbreaks for scenarios modeling how the species would fare. “Unfortunately,” Bockino wrote in her article, that interval is “in contrast to what is happening in the GYE,” where there have now been two epidemics in less than 20 years. 

“Real-time management action is urgent,” she wrote. “The prioritization of retaining every possible existing seed tree at all costs is unquestionable.”

Grand Teton National Park vegetation managers aren’t standing idly by.

“We know that without intervention, the persistence of the species is in jeopardy,” said Laura Jones, the park’s chief of vegetation management. “We’ve been gearing up for restoration actions and we’ve continued doing work protecting trees. And we do have some new funding sources.”

Grand Teton crews will begin planting 4,000 whitebark pine seedlings in the fall of 2025, Jones said. And there are ongoing efforts, she said, to install beetle traps at the known blister rust-resistant whitebark stands. 

In healthy stands of whitebark pine, Bockino and others have also continued hanging pouches of verbenone, a pheromone that signals to the beetles the trees are already occupied. There was talk of stopping the labor-intensive pouch-hanging efforts during the lull between beetle epidemics. 

“Right about that time, I was like, ‘Wait a minute,’” Bockino said. “We were having this massive outbreak on Static Divide, with hundreds of trees getting killed over there. That was 2019. It just kept growing.” 

Bockino has even gone so far as to ski up into the Tetons in the winter to strategically strip the bark off of beetle-infected trees. That fatally exposes the brooding insects to the sun and the cold, Bockino said. 

At least one ecologist is committed to doing whatever it takes to keep old, gnarled whitebarks that remain alive. 

“Think about it. A 700-year-old whitebark pine is beyond precious,” Bockino said. “That’s a long freaking time. Personally, I’m trying to do everything I can to save those.”