By Amy Katz, Conservation & GIS Manager
During the recent rare moments that I have not been dreaming of powder skiing, I have been thinking a lot about grass — particularly species such as mountain rough fescue, which stabilize soils across Eastern Montana and provide an important source of forage for bighorn sheep and mule deer. Sagebrush has also been on my mind. The shrub that dominates Southwest Montana is currently a significant conservation focus for many land trusts, practitioners, agencies, and funders, as the recent special issue of Rangeland Ecology & Management focused solely on sagebrush conservation demonstrates.
Sagebrush and grasslands ecosystems have garnered attention recently because they are disappearing at an alarming rate due to conifer expansion, invasive grasses, wildfire, agricultural expansion, and development — at an estimated rate of 1.3 million acres per year in the western United States sagebrush biome alone (Doherty et al. 2022). Several iconic bird species also rely on these areas: Greater sage-grouse, ferruginous hawks, sharptail grouse, prairie falcons, long-billed curlews, Sprague’s pipit, and western meadowlarks all make their home throughout grasslands and sagebrush ecosystems.
Over the last several years, Heart of the Rockies Initiative’s Keep It Connected program has mainly provided financial support to projects by demonstrating a project’s habitat and connectivity value for ungulates and large carnivores to align with funder interest and data availability. However, many projects coming through our portfolio also see myriad bird species and often contain diverse habitats that can include portions of grasslands and sagebrush, and we as a staff are learning how to best represent the importance of these projects to funders.
In 2023, with support from the Knobloch Family Foundation and the Liz Claiborne & Art Ortenberg Foundation, Keep It Connected worked with the Nature Conservancy of Canada Alberta to close the funding gap on a 55,000 acre easement on McIntyre Ranch, considered to be the largest undisturbed fescue grassland remaining in North America. We emphasized the importance of rough fescue and demonstrated migrations of bird species that summered on the property and wintered as far away as Texas and Mexico. The project gave us confidence in our ability to support projects in the grassland ecosystem, and combined with the current grassland conservation momentum in the West, excites us to continue learning about and pursuing avenues for Keep It Connected to fund similar projects in our service area.
In 2025, we are jumping aboard the grassland and sagebrush conservation movement with both feet (not unlike my attempt to keep up with the millennial fashion trends through my new UGG purchase). In partnership with Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, Heart of the Rockies Initiative is reporting on the current status of private grassland conservation in Montana and developing a tool to monitor progress on a yearly basis. We are also convening a working group of bird and grassland experts to guide our Keep It Connected program’s migratory bird strategy, ensuring we can continue to support our land trust partners through funding projects that support specific bird species of importance.
If you would like to be involved in our migratory bird, sagebrush, and grassland conservation efforts, or if you know someone who might be, please reach out to me: [email protected].
Doherty, K., Theobald, D.M., Bradford, J.B., Wiechman, L.A., Bedrosian, G., Boyd, C.S., Cahill, M., Coates, P.S., Creutzburg, M.K., Crist, M.R. Finn, S.P., 2022. A sagebrush conservation design to proactively restore America’s sagebrush biome (No. 2022-1081). US Geological Survey. https://doi.org/10.3133/ofr20221081. Accessed Feb 10, 2025.
