A neutral landscape approach to evaluating the umbrella species concept for greater sage-grouse in northeast Wyoming, USA

Greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) has been identified as a potential umbrella species with the assumption that conservation of their habitats in sagebrush ecosystems may benefit multiple other wildlife species, but co-occurrence with an umbrella species does not necessarily guarantee species will respond positively to management for sage-grouse. This may be particularly true for ecotones, such as at the eastern edge of the sage-grouse range where sagebrush steppe and Great Plains grasslands intersect. We used a novel application of neutral landscape models (Etherington et al., 2015) to evaluate observed and expected overlap between greater sage-grouse habitat (1994-2010; Fedy et al., 2014) and distribution of eight grassland songbird species (2008-2018; Monroe et al., 2021) in northeast Wyoming. Data formatting necessary for this analysis produced 17 rasters including sage-grouse habitat (nestGRSG300.tif and summerGRSG300.tif), songbird species distribution (grspFP300.tif, holaFP300.tif, larbFP300.tif, laspFP300.tif, loshFP300.tif, vespFP300.tif, wekiFP300.tif, wemeFP300.tif), songbird community metrics (total density and richness) thresholded at the 0.5 (abund_50_300.tif and rich_50_300.tif), 0.75 (abund_75_300.tif and rich_75_300.tif), and 0.9 quantiles (abund_90_300.tif and rich_90_300.tif), and a general mask to constrain simulations to pixels with songbird predictions (mask300.tif). We also include rasters for grasshopper sparrow (Ammodramus savannarum), sage-grouse nesting habitat, and associated masks but with pixels aggregated to 90 meters, 150 m, 450 m, and 600 m to evaluate sensitivity of results to raster resolution. Finally, in code.zip we provide example Python code to simulate neutral landscape models (nlm_umbrella_larb_habitat.py) and R code to determine the spatial autocorrelation parameter (h) for sage-grouse nesting and summer (brood-rearing) habitat using semivariograms (h_parameter_code.R).

                                            [
  "010:12"
]
                                        

                                            {
  "fn": "Adrian P Monroe",
  "@type": "vcard:Contact",
  "hasEmail": "mailto:amonroe@usgs.gov"
}
                                        

                                            [
  {
    "@type": "dcat:Distribution",
    "title": "Digital Data",
    "format": "XML",
    "accessURL": "https://doi.org/10.5066/P9MLURH7",
    "mediaType": "application/http",
    "description": "Landing page for access to the data"
  },
  {
    "@type": "dcat:Distribution",
    "title": "Original Metadata",
    "format": "XML",
    "mediaType": "text/xml",
    "description": "The metadata original format",
    "downloadURL": "https://data.usgs.gov/datacatalog/metadata/USGS.635c09bdd34ebe442504b1d6.xml"
  }
]
                                        

                                            [
  "Monte Carlo simulation",
  "Northeast Wyoming",
  "USGS:635c09bdd34ebe442504b1d6",
  "United States of America",
  "Wyoming",
  "biogeography",
  "biota",
  "birds",
  "community ecology",
  "ecosystem monitoring",
  "grassland ecosystems",
  "grassland songbirds",
  "habitat suitability indices",
  "habitats",
  "keystone species",
  "mathematical simulation",
  "migratory species",
  "natural resource management",
  "neutral landscape models",
  "sagebrush",
  "shrubland ecosystems",
  "species co-occurrence",
  "umbrella species"
]
                                        

                                            {
  "name": "U.S. Geological Survey",
  "@type": "org:Organization"
}
                                        

                                            [
  "Geospatial"
]