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precipitation occurring in the winter and spring—over half of the Great Basin
receives less than 305 mm of annual precipitation (West 1983 ).
The BLM is moving to an adaptive management approach to address the issues
of nonnative species, habitat conservation and restoration, wildfi res, and climate
change at large landscape scales. This is a signifi cant change from the historic
“command and control” approach to a more fl exible, collaborative, risk-tolerant,
and landscape-level approach. Past resource management strategies have been char-
acterized as a combination of (1) ad hoc management (e.g., “seat-of-the-pants”
management with little foresight), (2) “wait-and-see” management (e.g., try some-
thing and wait and see what happens), (3) and steady-state management (e.g., main-
tain a static condition in the face of nonlinear disturbances) as described in Williams
( 1997 ). Adaptive management is now emphasized by the Department of Interior
agencies (Williams and Brown 2012 ). In this section, we illustrate how the BLM is
implementing the adaptive management framework (Fig. 12.1 ).
12.5.1 BLM Background
The BLM approach to addressing B. tectorum has historically included changing
livestock grazing management practices, strategically reducing B. tectorum with the
use of strips of less fl ammable vegetation to reduce the spread of wildfi res (i.e.,
greenstrips), and rehabilitating burned areas to reduce postfi re B. tectorum domi-
nance. Extensive wildfi res in 1999 in which nearly 0.7 million ha of public land
were burned provided the stimulus for the BLM to launch a regional restoration
strategy through the Great Basin Restoration Initiative to proactively address B.
tectorum and wildfi res (Pellant et al. 2004 ). More recently, the issues of sagebrush
( Artemisia spp.) loss, increased wildfi res, and B. tectorum expansion have coalesced
into a concerted effort to conserve sagebrush habitat for sage-grouse in the Great
Basin. Sagebrush ecosystems are some of the largest and most imperiled in North
America (Noss et al. 1995 ), and sage-grouse is a sagebrush obligate bird species
that has been considered for listing under the Federal Endangered Species Act in
2008, 2010, and 2015. The sections that follow provide a case study for the adaptive
management approach that is currently being used by the BLM to manage, restore,
and conserve sage-grouse habitat in the Great Basin.
12.5.2 Applying Adaptive Management to Reduce the Spread
of B. tectorum and Conserve Sage-Grouse Habitat
12.5.2.1 Assess
Rapid Ecoregional Assessments (REAs) are used by the BLM to improve under-
standing of the existing condition of these landscapes and how these conditions may
be altered by ongoing environmental changes and land use demands ( http://www.
T.A. Monaco et al.