Sage grouse populations and distribution have diminished range wide by about fifty percent since european settlement

This $295,168 Cooperative Agreement awarded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Region 1 under the Endangered Species Recovery Implementation program (CFDA 15.657) will support Oregon State University in implementing conservation actions for sage grouse in southeast Oregon. The project aims to restore degraded sagebrush steppe habitats and mesic resources that are critical for sage grouse populations on the 16,645-acre Trout Creek Mountain Ranch. Key activities include developing innovative grazing management approaches, restoring riparian areas and water sources, and monitoring sage grouse populations and habitat conditions. This work will help stabilize and recover sage grouse populations in one of the largest remaining sagebrush habitats within the species' range. The agreement has an award date of January 20, 2025 and a completion date of January 19, 2029.

Sage grouse populations in oregon followed a similar pattern although distribution was less impacted than in other parts of the species range being reduced by about thirty percent. However southeast oregon remains part of one of the largest contiguous sagebrush steppe habitats within the extant range of sage grouse. Two of the key stressors for sage grouse in the great basin is conversion of sagebrush habitat to annual grasses primarily through catastrophic wildfire and limited availability of resilient mesic resources. Mesic resources are invaluable for sage grouse and for their broods as a source of highly nutritious forage during summer months and are especially important during times of drought. Historically these resources naturally occurred in the form of riparian corridors seep springs and the vegetation around small bodies of water. Given the limited availability of mesic habitats in the great basin these resources were also sought out by agricultural producers both farmers and ranchers to optimize their use for agricultural production. These types of developments manipulated and altered the natural occurrence and flow of water changing the distribution abundance and quality of these resources where they occurred. The consequences of these changes are difficult to enumerate especially in the absence of restoring them back to their original function. However one such opportunity has presented itself in southeast oregon. The trout creek mountain ranch located in far southeastern oregon near the town of fields oregon has recently come under the ownership and management of the oregon desert land trust odlt. The ranch includes 16645 acres of deeded land and has grazing allotment rights on greater than 500000 acres of BLM land on which IT intends to keep grazing domestic livestock. However odlt is seeking innovative approaches to grazing e.g. virtual fences and has developed a targeted strategy for restoring mesic resources on both the deeded and BLM lands under their management. Implementation of mesic restoration is underway and there is an unprecedented opportunity to understand how various restoration methods affect how sage grouse use these resources and outcomes for the productivity of their broods. Thus our goal is to implement a rigorously designed before after control impact baci field study that will enable US to measure the outcomes for sage grouse as IT relates to mesic restoration. Our objectives are to examine 1 how space use changes around restored mesic resources pre and post restoration and 2 how brood survival changes pre and post in relation to areas of mesic restoration. We are proposing to reinitiate and expand research in the trout creek mountains where an existing i.e. legacy database of sage grouse movement and demography has been studied since 2013.