WLFW West Newsletter April 2024
Holding the Line: Defending Wyoming's Sagebrush Cores from Cheatgrass
A CONSERVATION SUCCESS STORY FROM SUBLETTE COUNTY
After a long hard winter, the south-facing slope above Boulder Lake in Sublette County, Wyoming is lush. Needle and thread grass sways thigh-high and big bunches of arrowleaf balsamroot bloom in punches of yellow. Intermixed among the many large rocks are a host of other wildflowers and grasses.
Notably absent among these native species, is cheatgrass. This lack of cheatgrass is no lucky accident. It is the result of Sublette County's proactive treatment program—one of the first success stories in treating cheatgrass at a landscape scale.
The road to this point hasn't been easy, but as Julie Kraft, Sublette County's Weed & Pest Supervisor, looks across the slopes of Boulder Lake today, her eyes brighten. "When we see results like this, along the scale of thousands of acres, it's like, man, I'm glad that we didn't give up."
When Kraft first moved to Sublette County in 2010 to join the County's Weed & Pest team, she wasn't thinking about cheatgrass. But in one of her first meetings with the local sage grouse working group, the question was raised—did Sublette County have cheatgrass? And, if it did, what was Weed & Pest going to do about it?
In short order, Kraft teamed up with folks from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, USDA-NRCS, and others, and they got to work.
First, the group of resource managers invited anyone from the community who had information on cheatgrass, or who were simply interested in learning more, to an open house.
Today, nearly a decade after that first open house and years after they started treating cheatgrass along roadsides and south-facing slopes, the team has treated nearly every known area of cheatgrass in Sublette County – over 97,000 acres. Despite numerous challenges and setbacks, Kraft and her team of partners have worked across private and public land boundaries to successfully defend their valuable, intact sagebrush rangelands from further cheatgrass invasion.
Sage Grouse Umbrella?
NEW SCIENCE SHOWS SAGEBRUSH SONGBIRDS BENEFIT FROM SAGE GROUSE CONSERVATION
WLFW-affiliated researcher Elise Zarri studied how songbird populations responded to conifer management targeted at sage grouse.
Her research showed that non-target species that rely on sagebrush habitat experienced population increases following conifer removal, demonstrating that sage grouse conservation can benefit other species whose habitat closely overlaps with sage grouse.
