The $9 million for sagebrush ecosystem restoration and conservation in eight Western states, announced by the U.S. Department of the Interior earlier this month, is an investment in natural systems resilience, said Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in a news release.
The funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for this fiscal year will support more than just projects to restore and conserve strategic areas within the Western U.S. sagebrush ecosystem, according to DOI's June 16 news release.
"This is an historic opportunity to put resources into the health and natural infrastructure of America’s sagebrush ecosystem, which serves as the lifeblood of rural communities and tribal lands in the West,” Haaland said. “President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is the largest investment in the resilience of physical and natural systems in American history and will meaningfully advance on-the-ground efforts to promote healthy sagebrush landscapes and communities that have been threatened by the climate crisis."
U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.
| doi.gov/
The funded projects that cover 175 million acres will be used to combat invasive grasses and wildfire, safeguard water resources for neighboring communities and wildlife, reduce encroaching conifers and promote community and economic sustainability, according to the news release.
Sagebrush country in the Western U.S. is home to cultural, biological and economic resources of national significance, including more than 350 species such as elk, pronghorn, mule deer and the greater sage grouse.
"America's sagebrush ecosystem is the largest contiguous ecotype in the United States, comprising one-third of the land mass of the lower 48 states," the release said.
The threat to the ecosystem from invasive grasses, wildfire and encroaching conifers has been known for years. A report issued in March 2007 by the U.S. Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station warned that Western North American sagebrush habitats and the species that depend on those habitats were in jeopardy. Sagebrush has been declining rapidly across western North America and more than 350 plant and animal species were "at risk of local or regional extirpation," the report said.
"The sagebrush ecosystem is one of the largest in the United States and it is vulnerable to a litany of threats," the 15-year-old report said. "Chief among them is invasion of cheatgrass into the understory, followed by high-severity fires that cheatgrass promotes. The expansion of pinyon-juniper woodlands into sagebrush habitat and other human impacts, such as overgrazing by livestock and energy development, are also major sources of concern."
The report also referred to regional studies in the 1990s and into the 2000s that "identified areas with high potential for conservation and restoration, as well as those areas most vulnerable to degradation."
About a decade later, Montana Public Radio (MTPR) reported on the importance of sagebrush in the Great Basin and beyond without mentioning the dangers threatening the ecosystem.
"Anthropologists have found that early Native Americans used big sagebrush for a variety of medicinal and domestic purposes," MTPR reported in its May 2017 story. "The Shoshone and Paiute used the leaves to relieve toothaches. The Coahuilla, Hopi and Tewa peoples brewed a potent tea to treat stomach ailments. The Navajo wrapped aching, rheumatic joints in bandages of wet sagebrush leaves and they also boiled a sagebrush tea for treatment of post-partum pain suffered by new mothers, as well as for coughs and colds. Other tribes burned or steamed the fragrant leaves to purify the air."
Little has changed about the importance of sagebrush or the challenges it faces. An article published by Massive Science in May 2021 reported that the "sagebrush sea" of the American West "is rapidly vanishing."
"It's one of the only things around here that’s really green all year round," Elizabeth Leger, professor and director of the Museum of Natural History at the University of Nevada, Reno, said in the article. "It's literally the foundational shrub of this whole huge, cold desert area."
