AoR 138: BOSH Project Restores Sagebrush Sea at Grand Scale - Maestas, White, & Stuebner

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>> Welcome to the Art of Range, a podcast focused on range lands and the people who manage them. I'm your host, Tip Hudson, range and livestock specialist with Washington State University Extension. The goal of this podcast is education and conservation through conversation. Find us online at artofrange.com.

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Welcome back to the Art of Range. This begins our series with the Idaho Range Land Resources Commission on the life on the range series. We're going to begin by talking about the Bruneau-Owyhee Sage-Grouse Habitat Project known as BOSH. And this is a collaborative partnership of state and federal agencies, wildlife advocacy groups and private landowners who are restoring the native upland landscapes to a more natural condition. Namely, one with less juniper, that benefit sage-grouse, songbirds, antelope, spotted frogs and other stuff that prefers a native upland landscape and a natural condition. The BOSH project is unprecedented in scope and scale. Those are big words, but they're modifying 30,000 acres of state and federal lands per year to slow down juniper encroachment and enhance sage-grouse habitat, sagebrush step habitat. This is now in the sixth year of the project, and they have treated more than 140,000 acres, which is quite a bit of ground. So the guests for our discussion today are Connor White, who's the project manager for Pheasants Forever. He is out of Boise Idaho. Jeremy Maestas, who is the National Sagebrush Ecosystem specialist who's been on the podcast before. He works for the USDA NRCS in the Working Lands for Wildlife Program, and he's out of Bend, Oregon. And then we have on for the first time, Steve Stuebner, the writer and producer of the Life on the Range series, which is a public education project that has been sponsored for years by the Idaho Range Land Resources Commission. And he's also based in Boise. They did fairly comprehensive coverage of the BOSH story in one of the Life on the Range documentary films, which we're trying to feature with these, with the podcast series. They did that back in April of this year, which is 2024. The headline of that project of the story was BOSH Project Restores the Sagebrush C in Idaho at a Grand Scale. That's a bold title and any, I think any grand scale restoration project in sagebrush country is worth investigating. Connor, Jeremy and Steve, welcome.

>> Thank you.

>> Thanks, Tip.

>> Thanks for having us.

>> Steve, why don't we start with you. Since you were the storyteller on this, how did you get together with Connor to do some coverage on this large project?

>> You bet. Well, Connor reached out to me along with Lance Oakeson with the BLM Boise District office. He's a fire management officer. I've done a number of stories with Lance over the years. And they just asked me to come over and for coffee and talk about maybe doing a follow up story about juniper encroachment and the Owyhees. We had done an initial story about this topic back in 2012 with Art Talsma at the Nature Conservancy and several different landowners and talking about this topic for the first time and juniper encroachment. And so we had a good meeting, and I just thought sure, seems like there's some potential follow up items. Let's give it a go.

>> Yeah, Connor, we'll get into the meat of the project in just a minute. But why did you think that the Life on the Range platform would be a good place to tell this story?

>> Yeah. So I guess the BOSH Project, we just have a lot of partners, you know that might have their own various communication shops with, I don't want to say their own agendas, but you know, their own vision for what a finished product might look like. But the Life on the Range series really does a good job of just telling a successful story happening on rangelands all across Idaho. And I've watched, you know, those Life on the Range videos for well over a decade now and just knew that Steve always cranked out a really good quality product. And he really just understands what's happening out there. Which is, which is fairly difficult on the, you know, storytelling, public information officer side of things. They may not always understand what's happening on the ground. So, to me, it was just a no brainer to reach out to Steve and Life on the Range. And we had written in some funding through NFWF grant that we were doing some of the cutting with. We included some dollars to produce this video. So it just it really worked out and came out with a nice product.

>> Thank you. Steve, you're a storyteller. Was there something different about this project that made it a little bit more of a man bites dog story? I mean, I think there's value in just telling a good story where people are doing good work, but it sounded like there was a different angle on this based on some new research that, that got your attention.

>> Yeah, absolutely. And you know, Connor and Jeremy really talked about that in detail as we got into it. And you know, as a storyteller, if you've already done a story once, you're kind of looking for a new angle or new information to justify it. And in this case, there were just all kinds of things that they talked about and new research that's been done since 2012 to spotlight in this story. And so there's no question in my mind this would be an awesome follow up.

>> Yeah. You mentioned in the story that conifer encroachment is maybe recognized now as the number two threat to sagebrush ecosystems. I've been around rangelands for the last 25 years, and that was a surprise to me. Is it that the juniper encroachment is a threat specifically to sagebrush ecosystems in general or to sage-grouse supporting ecosystems more specifically. Jeremy, maybe we'll have you jump in here.

>> Yeah, happy to and glad to be back on the podcast, Tip. Yeah, let me, let me back up for a second and put my role in this discussion into some context. I'm a guest in this Owyhee landscape. I'm based in Oregon, but I get to work all over the sagebrush biome as part of our working lands for wildlife framework for conservation action and the, and the sagebrush ecosystem. So I really get a good perspective on what's out there, what's happening, and get to interact with lots of amazing groups. But you're not wrong in that this is a very special project in terms of scope and scale but also the people and the partnerships that are helping to make all of this happen. You're surprised about conifer encroachment being the number two threat to sagebrush ecosystems is actually common in the rangeland profession. You know, I would say in the good old days we probably spent most of our time talking about how to improve grazing management systems, right. And that's still very much a topic of discussion and an important issue in rangeland management. But you know, what remote sensing has taught us in terms of technology in the last 10 years, we've had incredible breakthroughs with our ability to see the landscape from space. So I'm sure you've talked in the past about the rangeland analysis platform and some of these other remotely sensed datasets. Well, that's kind of been the big breakthrough that's allowed us to see that across US rangelands, woody encroachment on grasslands and shrub lands is pervasive and one of the most fastest, I guess, moving threats that's changing our ecosystems. And so here in sagebrush country, we did an analysis with a whole group of interagency partners recently to identify like what are the key issues degrading the health of sagebrush step. And what we found was first, invasive annual grasses, cheatgrass, medusahead, ventenata, by far our number one driver of degradation. What followed right thereafter was conifer encroachment by our native juniper and other conifer tree species. So anyway, just to put it into context, you know, this project is squarely aligned with addressing that number two threat to the sagebrush biome.

>> I've, this is maybe an aside, but I've wondered for years what the biological bounds are on the juniper species distribution. I live in central Washington, in the Columbia Basin, and there are no junipers anywhere. In fact, the only real juniper presence in Washington state is kind of in the Southeast pocket up against Oregon, Central Oregon. Yeah, so we don't have a lot of juniper encroachment on rangelands in Washington state, but I'm aware that people have been trying to control juniper, particularly on private ranch land in Oregon, for a long, long time. How, what are some of the effects of juniper encroachment?

>> Yeah, you know, so just to think about the actual distribution. We have native opinion pine and juniper forest. We have native coniferous forests that are part of the mosaic of the West and always have been. But they're really, you know, they've been limited by in their distribution by climate, moisture, available precipitation. But for a whole variety of reasons over the last century, those forested systems have started to move into what were historically grasslands and shrub lands. And when that happens, there's kind of a chain reaction of changes that impact species that depend on open range lands that don't have trees in them. They're dominated by those grasses, forbs and shrubs. And so as those trees move in, we see very predictable changes in terms of the loss. First of our shrub components, so you'll see things like sagebrush, bitter brush, the browse species start to go away and die back. And eventually if that gets thick enough, we can actually lose the perennial bunch grasses like blue bunch wheat grass that hold these sites together so we can see accelerated erosion. We can see transitions to invasive annual grasses when you don't have any competing native vegetation there. So you know, there's these plant composition changes. But from a wildlife standpoint, some of the early research we did, through our sage-grouse initiative partnerships, taught us that things like sage-grouse are very sensitive to tall things in their habitats. So they don't really like trees on the landscape and in fact will avoid areas that are otherwise suitable with just a few trees per acre. And so simply the presence of having that tall structure in their habitat can actually result in habitat loss for them. So real serious consequences for our wildlife but also these chain reactions in terms of the plant community, our water cycles, our nutrient cycles and things that maybe are less well known.

>> Yeah, that's interesting. I've seen that with migratory waterfowl habitat in Washington state where you have these pothole wetlands and encroachment by Russian olive. And when the Russian olive starts to get abundant it, you know, obviously completely changes the vegetation structure. And that by itself, even if all of the other habitat variables are in place in terms of food and actual open water, just the addition of the Russian olive trees in the landscape causes all of those birds to go somewhere else. You mentioned earlier that we focused in the past more on grazing management systems. Just a thought on that. I think one of the reasons for that is that in general, there's not a lot of, there's not a lot of financial revenue that comes off of rangelands. And so in the absence of, you know, other kinds of inputs, we're generally trying to manage using tools that don't cost a lot. And of course grazing has been one of those. And if, you know, in places where there have been a history of over grazing, if you change grazing management, it does produce positive changes in vegetation and then translating into habitat variables. But I was recalling from a conversation with Nathan Sayre about his book Politics of Scale that we recently re-released on the podcast. That where, where grazing pressure is not excessive, then grazing management is no longer the dominant variable in vegetation change. And I think we see that, you know, in the last 50 years as many, many rangeland landscapes around the West are no longer limited by the timing and duration and frequency of grazing, which in the past maybe had been excessive. And so now we're seeing various kinds of vegetation expression that are happening in the absence of that kind of grazing pressure. And certainly the release of things like juniper seems to be one of those effects.

>> Yeah, I think that's a great observation and characterization. You know, it's not to say that grazing management still isn't important. It's, in this era, in this century, we have new threats that are the primary drivers of change, and invasive species have long been recognized as one of those climate interacting with that, of course. And so different issues require some different solutions. Yeah and they take some money, which is maybe a question here. You know, you guys have said that this is a really big project with a capital B. And in the in the article you say it's probably five to six times larger than any similar project that's been undertaken to address juniper specifically. How big is the project, and maybe we'll back up, you know, one step further. How did the, how did the funding come together and how did this start?

>> Yeah, maybe I'll kick that over to Connor and then I can provide my perspective on the scale.

>> Sure, yeah. So I jumped in as project coordinator in 2020 after the project had already been going for one year. So we started in 2019. And the BLM underwent an EIS process, environmental impact statement, which took several years, lots of collaboration, lots of meetings, you know, lots of give and take. And that that just, I just like to underscore that, just getting an EIS done in and of itself is a pretty monumental task. So I guess what we ended up with was a project area that was 1.67 million acres. And within that, they did some analysis, you know, on like, okay, areas with this much percent sagebrush still left and, you know, about this much percent juniper on the landscape or what we want to target. So within that 1.67 million acres, there's a 617,000 acre focal treatment area we call it where treatments might actually occur. But you know, they analyzed just an enormous swath of country there in Southwest Idaho. And yeah, started cutting in 2019 with 37,000 acres, and we've been rolling, we've been rolling ever since.

>> Yeah, that's interesting. And just an aside here. An EIS is more difficult when you expect it to make a big difference. You're not aiming for a finding of no significance. You're aiming for a finding of great significance, and you have to justify that and justify or, you know, provide some reasonable expectation that the significance will be beneficial and not negative.

>> That's right, yeah. Because in this, in this instance, right, you know, it's like we have data and in studies for years, you know, on the on the effects of juniper removal, the beneficial effects of juniper removal. But a lot of it just came down to the scale, you know, when the time they reached 617,000 acres, it's like, yeah, that's just such a large, a large area. Because they started it, started it down on the EA process and then, you know, through the process moved it over to an EIS.

>> Yeah, I was going to add, Tip, you know, for me and NRCS on the private land side, this project has a 14 year history. We in the early days of our sage-grouse initiative, our staff and our partners there in that county really recognize the importance of that place in terms of addressing conifer encroachment. And it was where some of the landowners were early adopters in our sage-grouse initiative and treated the private lands, which are a minor component of that landscape, an important one with that's how, actually has a lot of the water. Some of the stuff Steve mentioned in the early interviews they did with the Life of the Range, and we were always hoping that we could snap together the public lands, right, and get this whole landscape effect with state and federal lands coming along. And the wheels of change move slowly within the BLM. But they did actually do all that analysis to get the authorization to do this work. And I can tell you, I'm coming off of, Connor took the working lands for wildlife team out on a tour just this week. We spent two days, eight hours a day, driving around this project area. And if the listeners can just, you know, imagine the scale of this project. When you drive for eight hours and you don't leave the project area, that's big, okay. And there's just no other way to describe the enormity of it than to be there and feel it and see it. And you go wow, this is unique.

>> Yeah, the Owyhees are true wide open spaces and wild open spaces, as you guys sometimes say.

>> And I just maybe add in a little bit of context on the BLM side, you know. Because back in, I would say 2007 or 8 through like 2013, you know, the BLM had written a couple different EAs, you know, for a couple thousand acres of juniper cutting here, maybe up to 10,000 acres here and there. And they were just, we were kind of at a crossroads on, like, all right, are we just going to keep continually writing an EA every time we want to cut 10,000 acres of juniper? Or are we just going to take, you know, take a pause here, look at the entire Owyhees and say, let's, let's get a big document that we can really get a lot of work done under. And yeah, it might take a little longer. But now that, now that it's in place, I believe that was definitely the right thing to do. Because we've been able to pull in a lot of funding, you know, because it's almost a legacy project now of just like everybody knows what it is and therefore it's very attractive when you go to, you know, these grant funding partners and ask for money. Because they know what it is, they know the reputation of the project and know the end goal of it. And we're only, you know, in the sixth year of it. So there's still several more years to go.

>> Yeah, got to give a lot of credit to Lance Okeson from the BLM, the fuels lead there that Steve mentioned. He's always had this vision of doing things at a landscape scale. And you know, he's basically like saying if you don't do it from horizon to horizon, you might as well go home. And so I think the vision was there, the shared vision with the partnership and just getting all of the documentation and planning and paperwork in place to actually make it happen was a feat in and of itself. And so hats off to the staff that all work to make that happen.

>> I say, and definitely the partners as well. You know this stuff would not have gotten across the finish line with just Lance. There's definitely the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Fish Game, Governor's Office of Species Conservation, you know, all the partners lined up in support of the project as it was going through the NEPA [phonetic] analysis.

>> Yeah, that problem of scale I think has always plagued natural resources research because we can, you know, if we're trying to measure individual plants, you can, you can do things at a small plot scale. But if you're trying to manipulate species habitat, if it's not big, it's not going to do anything. And this is definitely big. You know, I think one of our approaches in the past has been to just leave things alone with the idea that if we leave it alone, whatever we get is going to be natural. And this seems like one of the first large scale departures from that where there's an attempt to essentially dictate, you know, to impose a particular vegetation structure that will be beneficial to a variety of species. But what, you mentioned earlier that that juniper encroachment tends to decrease particularly perennial grass production. But there are other effects of that. The sage-grouse are somewhat dependent on mesic areas, spots in the landscape that have a little bit more water that grow a different kind of vegetation that grow perennial and annual forbs that provide plants for food that are different than the big bunch grasses. And juniper just sucks the water out of the ground. I'm not sure there's any fancier scientific way of saying it. Talk a little bit more about the large scale effects. You know, it's one thing if you've got a patch of juniper and then you have a patch of dry. But when you have hundreds of thousands or millions of acres, that become dominated by juniper, that's a very, very big hydrologic effect.

>> It sure is, and there's been some really cool work actually right there in the Owyhees by the ARS looking at kind of watershed scale changes when you convert from a sagebrush step lands landscape to a forest. And an interesting finding there was what it does to snow accumulation and snow drifts on the landscape. So you can imagine in a typical sagebrush ecosystem you get like these really wind swept ridges and things, and cornices of snow that hang on at the top until, you know, late July. Well, those things melt at a different rate and provide water down through the watershed into that late season, when everything else is dry. And when you convert to a more wooded system, that snow accumulation changes. It's more dispersed. It evaporates. You get more evapotranspiration. Some of that water never even hits the ground. And so it affects how long these streams can run. So there's massive effects like that. And then there's the more localized effects right around springs, seeps and meadows that definitely, you know, these plants are outcompeting some of the other herbaceous plants that have deep roots that allow that infiltration to occur into the groundwater. So yeah, there's some incalculable effects really on hydrology that were, that are happening just making this a more dry place.

>> What's the timeline of that change? When did that begin? The significant juniper encroachment.

>> Well, there's been, you know, if you want to look far enough back in the record to the Pleistocene juniper, woodlands have moved in and out of the West.

>> Okay.

>> But for our purposes today, you know, what we actually manage for are the suite of species that we value and we depend upon these rangelands for our forage and recreation. If you want to look at that record, it's really the 1800s, late 1800s we saw a tremendous expansion in juniper across the landscape. And that's been very well documented by a number of different scientists looking at the dendrochronology and aging trees. That change pushed trees and the landscapes all over the place where they hadn't been for hundreds or thousands of years. But what's really interesting is that with the remotely sensed data that we can now use from the, you know, 90s on today, that expansion is continuing to happen. We're documenting it. It's, you know, trees are still moving into new places. They're still reproducing and converting shrublands into forests. So it's not just a historic problem, but it's continuing to happen today. And we've got another cool way to communicate this, we just, our partners at the University of Montana, Scott Morford and Dave Naugle put together a what they call the landscape explorer, if you go to landscapeexplorer.org. They took all the old aerial imagery from the Army and others of the 1940s and 50s and geo-rectified that. And you can now go in for anywhere in the West, like the entire West, and take a look at a place, you know, 80 years ago and use a little swipe bar to see what the current imagery looks like from Google versus historic imagery. And you could see that even in the last 80 years, there's been a tremendous amount of change.

>> You know, and when you're doing a video, that technology just, you know, speaks volumes. You know, we put that in our video early on on the BOSH project and, you know, if people have any doubt, you know, you can just see it with the slider going back and forth showing historic and then current day. It's just a great way to tell the story with visuals.

>> Yeah, there's a, this is a funny issue to work on because human beings love trees. I love trees. I love pinyon juniper, you know. And so it's such a slow change that you could call it a shifting baseline syndrome problem, right. where our generation has a hard time seeing the change. And so we may underestimate the effects and how much has actually happened because it might take two or three human lifetimes to play out. And so this kind of imagery can help have a conversation about how things were visually that is pretty compelling.

>> Yeah, you guys are doing a good job describing the landscape explorer. It's going to take some self-control for me to not take a look at it while we're trying to talk about this here. Yeah, that sounds really interesting. And to your point, you know, we can use words like there's been a 300% increase in conifer encroachment in the last 75 years. But seeing that, yeah, from a, you know, from a satellite image and an animated change over time has a whole different impact. Was it just fire that was the main check on the species distribution and abundance? Or are there other factors that are involved in conifer encroachment?

>> Sounds like a trick question.

>> I mean the answer might be yes, but.

>> Yeah. Well, I'll give you, I'll give you the appropriate answer as it depends and it's complex, right.

>> You sound like Steve Bunting.

>> I would say, I know. Well, I will, you know, the more years I get into conservation, the more I respect that answer. But I would say early on, I think our paradigm and hypothesis was that this was very much a fire driven problem, right. It was fire suppression. It was historic overgrazing, pre Taylor Grazing Act that took the fine fuels off the landscape and promoted woody plant expansion. Followed by fire suppression later in the, you know, mid-1900s. But you know, that doesn't really explain the global nature of this change. You can look on basically every continent except Antarctica where we're seeing trees move into grasslands and shrublands. Me personally, I think climate is the only thing that can explain that change at such a scale. And so, you know, it's some combination thereof of those factors that are interacting that have challenged our ability to conserve grasslands and shrublands, which are among the most imperiled systems globally.

>> Yeah, I'm, I'm resisting the urge to talk about that more, but we probably should move on to some of the mechanics of the project. Pun intended. You say that you're mimicking fire by using mechanical cutting. Does the cutting mimic fire well enough? It certainly has the effect of getting that structure off of the landscape. And is that sufficient?

>> Well, and that's a lot of what, because we've just lost a lot of rangeland, you know through large scale wildfires that are out there. So there was a great paper that came out just a few years ago on, you know, oh, should we cut or should we burn with regards to juniper management? And the real take away from that is both. So if you want instant habitat, yeah, mechanical cutting is your way to go. If you want lasting control on juniper, you need to also incorporate prescribed fire because it really, really does eliminate the seed source. Because if you go in there and cut the deal, you just don't remove that seed source. And if you have a large tree, you know, you might have five to ten. And I don't know, Jeremy, and these guys, they saw this just this week when we were touring. In a lot of these areas, we're going to have to come back in and do maintenance. And that's been known. But the more times we can incorporate appropriate levels of prescribed fire, the better we are, because we're just going to be eliminating more of that seed source and saving us additional expense down the road.

>> And Tip I was --

>> Yeah and to state, go ahead.

>> Sorry, I was just struck by the precision with which Connor and the BLM crews do their prescribed burning. Maybe Connor could talk about that a little bit in terms of how critical the timing is when they come in and do their spring burning.

>> Yeah.

>> And to state the obvious, you know, when you cut down a whole bunch of trees, now you have a flammable carcass out on the ground. And it's one thing if that's 10 trees, but we're talking about thousands upon thousands of them, you've got to do something, I would assume. Yeah, so go ahead and answer Steve's question. I'm curious too. It looks like you still have to incorporate fire somehow to get rid of, you can't just, they don't just disappear.

>> Correct. Yeah, no, and I sometimes describe it as you know, we just created a red needle bomb out there in some of these places. And we definitely want to clean that up. Because you know, every summer it's, right now it's the middle of August. We're right in the middle of wildfire season. You will get ignitions. That's just a given. Depends, you know, on the year on how many you get, whether they're lightning or from humans. But if we, you know, get a, get a start out there in one of these cutting units and really we haven't had this happen yet, but it's bound to happen at some point. And we send our firefighters out there into this, what, yeah, red needle bomb. We've just set them up for complete and total failure when they get there. You know, they're going to try to be looking to hold a fire on established roads. And if there's a whole bunch of juniper slash out there, that fire is going to be blowing right over that road, and they're just going to be out there getting their butts kicked. So we really want to focus in our burning efforts on cleaning up the slash next to the roads first and then in areas of heavier accumulations just wanting to break that up a little bit, break up that fuel continuity. But yeah, mainly focusing near the roads if we can, if we only have limited time or resources, do the roads first. And we've been doing that pretty successfully. And we'll also go in and pile near the roads, just to make sure we get rid of all the material. In the other areas where it may not be as critical, you know, as a roadway, but we still want to clean some of it up, we do what we call jackpot burning, which is essentially just burning the tree right where it lays after it was done cutting and it dries out. Which we usually go in about 12 to 18 months after we cut the trees is when we'll look to burn them.

>> So what does the mechanics of this look like? We're talking in the abstract about cutting down lots of junipers. And I heard a guy who teaches, I don't really know anything about journalism, but I heard somebody who does one time say that it's important when you're telling a story to stay low on the ladder of abstraction. So I'm wanting to get into the details here, are we, are we talking about sending out lots and lots of people with chainsaws?

>> Yes, indeed we are. You know, there's a lot of different methods that have been used across the West and are still being used. You know, a lot of the stuff in maybe South Central Idaho through Utah and Nevada, they might be looking to do mastication on some of these, some of these projects. And that works well for them down there, but it is a lot more expensive to send out a machine to grind down a tree. You know, that's several hundred dollars per acre and possibly with an additional expense of buying seed and flying that on. But then back to just our scale of the problem is, you know, you're spending all this money on perhaps a limited acreage where we could spend, you know, the equivalent amount of money and get done a lot more acres. If we're out there with chainsaw, you know, lop and drop lop and scatter, cut and lock. It has a, it all means the same thing, it's just a bunch of guys out there with chainsaws cutting the slash down to a predetermined height. And yeah, just moving through the landscape like a field of locusts is how Jeremy described it earlier this week. And I know on our, on the story that we put out this spring, you know, it made reference to, we had 50 chainsaws going last year. Well, this year, you know, with the funding that we've got through various grants and partners as well as the big bump that the BLM got through the infrastructure law, the bill stuff, we are going to try to double our production. They're out there working right now probably as we're recording this. We've got three different crews working in two or three different areas. And there's 100, there's 100 chainsaws going right now this morning, out on BOSH.

>> Yeah, it is truly amazing to be on the ground this week with Connor and his partners. You drive up and you get out of the truck, and it sounds like a swarm of drones. And you just, you look and there's helmet after helmet after helmet of sawyers, out there, walking across the landscape and breaking down these trees. And, you know, you sit there for 30 minutes and watch an entire horizon open up that you couldn't see before. And so it's very visually stunning. You know, from a restorationist viewpoint, it's beautiful. If you aren't used to it, it could be a little bit shocking because sometimes restoration and disturbance looks ugly, right, the initial phase. What we need to do is think about change over time. And so, you know, in a few years as that slash gets treated and broke down and the green grass comes back, it'll look more visually appealing in just a few years. But yeah, the change is obvious.

>> Do they cut everything, or do you have leave trees like a forest prescription?

>> A lot of times we do have some trees that get left. We have, I guess just one deals they have bearing trees, some of them. You know they have the monumented corners. And then in those old time notes that sometimes they used a tree to help reference that --

>> Frail witness post, yeah.

>> Yep. And if so, if the if that monument gets destroyed, they can go recreate it. Apparently, it's fairly labor intensive if they don't have anything to go off of. So we do leave the bearing trees as well as old growth trees that's written into the document. And those are not necessarily based on size but just based on characteristics. You know, there's several things to look for out there on an old growth tree that's a lot different from a young, quote/unquote, encroachment tree. Mainly just, yeah, it's all about vegetative characteristics and land. And we have an old growth tree where Lance explains that in the video. But yeah, there's, you know, the presence or absence of lichen. You know the bark characteristics as well as just the overall stature of the tree. You know, those young trees have a pointy top where old growth might have a lot of rounded. They're just kind of the craggily looking ones, so to speak.

>> Well, I agree. I tend to like grass, and I like open spaces. I do like forests, but I don't know, I'm not a big fan of juniper forest. So it looks good to us, at least most of us. How does it look to a sage-grouse? If you build it, do they come?

>> They definitely do. And I might pawn this over to Jeremy, but yeah, it's there's been again a lot of, lot of research that we've learned about here in the last, in the last decade. And I might let Jeremy hop in on the stuff they've seen over in Oregon on the Warner Mountains.

>> Sure. Yeah, this was a big focus of our early research with our sage-grouse initiative science partners back in 2010 when we started scaling up tree removal to benefit sage-grouse in particular. And one major Petri dish where we set up a landscape scale experiment and collared birds, followed them for a decade to really understand how they respond to these treatments was just to the west of Owyhee County over in the Warner Mountains of Oregon, literally just about the same latitude. Very similar ecosystem, same species of western juniper encroachment. And we essentially followed birds both in a treatment landscape and then a large nearby control landscape where we didn't treat anything. Followed those before we did anything and then for about eight years after the treatments were done. And what we found early was that when we treated these areas that were nearby where sage-grouse already lived and breathed, you know, these leks. Birds quickly recolonized those areas that they avoided before treatment. So if it had trees in it and it was otherwise pretty good troubling [phonetic], take the trees out. We saw them move in within a year or two and start using that as nesting habitat. But the big, the big finding really was, you know, being able to document for the first time in the literature, a population level response to a restoration action by sage-grouse. And we showed that these landscape scale treatments in the Warner Mountains produced about a 12% positive increase in their population growth rate over time. Which when that adds up, it turns into a lot of birds over time. There was about a five or six year lag, so you know, that's something to keep in mind. It takes time for this to play out. But we're, you know, the folks in BOSH and the BLM, NEPA document, very much is replicating that same strategic kind of approach to tackling this problem. And I would fully expect grouse to be a beneficiary of that work.

>> And Jeremy, maybe mention like what was the scale of that Warner Mountain project study as compared to the BOSH?

>> Yeah.

>> Exactly, you know, so we talk about BOSH being five to six times larger than, you know, our typical conifer restoration. So in the Warners, we had about 100,000 acre treatment area and treated only about 35,000 acres. So that scale of treatment, producing a population level response for grouse. Remember, I think Connor said they're probably treating about 30,000 acres per year in BOSH right now. So yeah, this is going to be a big deal for sage-grouse in Southwest Idaho.

>> So the birds aren't just moving around. It's not just redistribution into places where there now are fewer junipers.

>> Right. Yeah, so if you were just looking at occupancy, that's one part of the story. But we were able to get demographic changes, you know, better birth rates lower mortality, more birds. And that's what ultimately is going to have to happen to turn things around for grouse.

>> Are you having to provide perennial grass seed in places where you're taking out the junipers? I've seen some places with thick enough juniper that there's not a whole lot of grass left. To what extent is there, what are, what are the other pieces, I guess, in this restoration project besides just taking out junipers?

>> You know, on BOSH, we really haven't done a lot of follow up seeding. In some instances after we burn piles, we'll go in and, you know, sprinkle a little bit of seed on that ash pit there just because a pile, you know, does put a lot of heat down into the ground and kills most of the, most of the seed source under that pile. But by and large, you know, just due to the high, mid to higher elevation nature of where we're working at in BOSH, the natural recovery is pretty dang good. You know, you really have to, have to heat something up really on, like a really hot prescribed burn to get to the point where you're needing to do seed. And we just haven't had any of that for the stuff we've done on BOSH to date. You know, like I mentioned earlier, yeah, there's other places around the West that that do indeed fly on seed before they do, perhaps, like a mastication treatment. But they're dealing with a, you know, it's a different system from what we've got going on in Southwest Idaho. We've got the western juniper, and it still is a fairly cold environment up there in the Owyhees. so I'd say not perhaps as much of a concern of annual grass coming into some spots as you would say perhaps in Utah and Nevada. So we do, I say seating on a limited basis, but mainly just the cutting and then the follow up prescribed burning.

>> What has been the response from ranchers? I've heard from some ranchers like, Jeremy, you might know John and Lynn Breeze in Oregon in the John Day area. They've been cutting juniper for years. It's just a, you know, annually you have a crew that cuts down some junipers, tear up some chainsaw blades and do it again next year. But one of the reasons why they do it is because of the grass response. Is the grass response one of the main reasons why ranchers are supportive, or are there other benefits that translate to private landowners?

>> Yeah, I can speak broadly to that and then maybe Connor has some anecdotes from local ranchers there in that landscape. But producers get this, right. They have been chipping away at juniper encroachment problems their entire lives, you know. And the challenge they face is doing this work out of an annual operating budget where they have a lot of other expenses. And so they only have a small scale at which they could do this. Maybe they pick their most important piece of the pasture and they're just trying to work on that for like a decade. What these partnerships have done is help to bring in resources to do this at scale like in treating an entire ranch. And so many of the producers I talked to talk about getting the ranch back, you know, and being able to hand back to their next generation a ranch that's as productive as it was when they got it. So what happens you can imagine over time as these trees move in and we lose that herbaceous production, you know, you're having to run the same amount of livestock on fewer acres. And which has impacts on the acres that are left. So one of the things we did in BOSH, our science team out of Montana estimated the amount of lost production, herbaceous production, that producers out there need and rely on for their livestock operations. And when they looked at all the untreated areas across the BOSH, they're losing about 20,000 tons of herbaceous production per year by not treating those, those encroached areas.

>> That's a lot of grass.

>> It's a lot of grass, so think of how many round bales or how much hay you have to buy to replace that forage that's being lost. Well, with restoration, the good news is we can actually see that productivity come back, and we've documented that with our science. But you know, about 1/4 of that production has already been recovered about 5,000 acres per year just based on the restoration they've already done. So, yes, I'll just add one last thing before kicking it over to Connor. But we were out on the site, you know, earlier this week watching the locust cut down the trees and up comes a truck and trailer and it's a rancher. And she's, you know, pumping her arms in joy that this is all happening because, you know, of course they feel the effects of this but don't have the resources to be able to address it at scale.

>> Yeah, I just, maybe to follow up on that. The private landowners were really the ones that I say got us to scale first, right. So you know SGI, IN our CSSGI rolled out in 2010, And there were, of course, you know, early adopters on that. And then it really picked up speed through, you know, 2012 through 2016. But there's still interest in that even today. And that's some of the cutters we saw in our field trip. On Tuesday, we're doing an NRCS cut, you know, which was right after a stop we made at some other cutting we've done on BLM. So they were definitely the early adopters and helped us really with some lessons learned too. Because BLM and the private, you know, when we first started doing juniper cuts, say well over 10 years ago, probably 15 years ago at this point, you know, they would, they would just go out there and cut the tree down and walk on to the next one without doing any lopping. So right now the specifications are to lop the slash down to about four feet in height, which is about chest high. But in the early days of, you know, some BLM cutting as well as NRCS private land cutting, we weren't really doing that. And then through time it's just like, well that, you know, that tree's just as tall cut as it was standing up. So, you know, is this really going to help us out for grouse? So just making those tweaks on the smaller private land acreages really has been beneficial so that when we did get BOSH online it's like, yeah, we definitely want to be doing this. We may not want to be doing that. And that's helped us through time as we've scaled up.

>> You know, one of the main limiting factors to good grazing management is animal distribution. And in these kinds of landscapes, animal distribution is almost entirely related to water. And you've documented that you've got springs and seeps and riparian areas that come back to life after the juniper removal. Yeah, maybe talk just a little bit about that and then we'll, we'll try to wrap it up.

>> Yeah, so I think that a lot of this is, yeah, what the ranchers have, because these, they've seen these, you know, they've seen it go down and then now they're seeing it come back the other way. So I guess it might be a little harder for me to drill down on some of that stuff just because I haven't seen it through, you know, just haven't seen that swing through time. But yeah, the juniper is going to use the water if it's available. They're real good at, you know, drinking up, you know, I think if it's there, they'll use it, you know. Maybe 30, 30 gallons per day, 40 gallons. The number, you know, you hear a lot of different numbers out there, but it's a significant, it's a significant amount of water that could definitely be, yeah, for you being, used further down that creek to stuff that's a lot more beneficial to grouse. And that, it also ties in with some of the stuff we're doing in the, in the mesic restoration world as well. You know, when we come in and do some of these prescribed burns that are perhaps higher up in the watershed releases a lot more water down some of these creeks into grouse country. I'm thinking Jeremy, on like our Juniper Mountain. field trip on Monday, you know. Which was not a sage-grouse project, but we did a big landscape level broadcast burn that then puts a lot more water down into these creeks that go to grouse country. That's a big deal for sage-grouse later in the year. And then on BOSH, you see perhaps not as dramatic of an effect on that but still definitely a benefit there as well. Yeah, we were out, actually an example of this, had a rancher with us that first day, Chris Black, Owyhee rancher. And after touring the Uplands went to some of his private ground that was along a stream. And we got to see how he's now coupling the Upland work that he did on his private with some low tech restoration methods in the meadow. This was an in size stream that had down cut, dried out. And he went in and did a number of different techniques to get that water to slow down and spread out. And he just shared with me some really cool drone footage as he's monitoring the changes overtime. And he's pointing out on the landscape as we're standing there the wetland vegetation popping up that wasn't there before. As he, you know, he can, he sees that groundwater getting slowed down, producing more green groceries later in the season. So this has real world consequences in the landscape that is quite arid.

>> Yeah, and in the desert, we don't tend to expect very rapid vegetation change. But I've taken advice from other people who said it was a good idea, have been following some photo points in a number of different landscapes for years. And the amount of change that can happen in a pretty short period of time, even in a location that doesn't get much precipitation, is really, really shocking.

>> Yeah. Well, Chris Brock is one heck of a range manager, and he's won national awards for his work. I'm really glad that you got to spend some time with Chrism Jeremy. I've been to this place many times. It's quite something. << I don't know that we had gone through the list of partners, you know, it goes without saying, but we're going to say it that something this large requires a lot of, a lot of organizations and a lot of people involved and a lot of funding. We've talked around some of the project partners, but who are, does anybody have the full list on hand?

>> Before you dive into that, Connor. You know, we had our whole new leadership team for working lands for wildlife out there, right, for two days and we got to debrief and go around the horn and see what people thought. And of course, besides the word scale, the next word was people. And just the sheer cooperation amongst agencies and the individuals that are working on this was stunning. And it was also inspiring to see what's possible when people come together.

>> And it's unusual. I mean, all of these agencies have different, they have, you know, different charges in terms of what they exist for. But what you're describing here is --

>> Yeah, I mean it was clear to us that, it was clear to us that they have a shared vision for what that place should look like over time. And they're all working and rowing in the same direction to make that happen regardless of the many challenges that exist to make that possible. Yeah, Connor, I don't know if you're ready to like give us a quick, you know, cliff notes of some of the names of the partners involved.

>> Yeah. So obviously, you know, it was a BLM that did the EIS and is working on the, on the federal land side of things. On the private land, NRCS. The state land, state trust lands, we've got Idaho Department of Lands as well as Idaho Department of Fish and Games been a huge supporter the whole way along. The governor's office, the species conservation as well as the US Fish and Wildlife Service has also been a huge, huge supporter. But then we had some of these other, I want to say critter groups, but RBF has financially supported the project since it started. I work for Pheasants Forever, and we've had capacity in this area through the NRCSSGI shared positions for several years. And now with our partnering to conserve sagebrush rangelands effort with the Intermountain West Joint Venture as well in supporting my position. But then also the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation has given us two different grants, several hundred thousand dollars from those guys as well. So collectively, you know, yeah, I mean, I'm on the phone or emails or teams chats with these folks every day, basically. And right now is the most exciting time of the year is because when all this planning comes together, and we're out there on the landscape implementing it.

>> What do you think is the future of the project once the locusts make their way across the Owyhees? Yeah, what's next?

>> Well, I say near term for even like just this winter, it's like we're going to have about 1,000 acres of piles to burn.

>> Yeah.

>> And then next spring of '25 will be several 1,000 acres of jackpot burning. But then yeah, I bet you know, and we'll see where we're at on how long it takes to get through all this. But I bet we've got another five to 10 years. Probably. Some of it is just going to be depends on, you know, like how much, how much burning can we actually get done in a spring. And that depends, you know, that's affect how much we actually want to cut on some certain years. Yeah, there will obviously be a maintenance component that will be ongoing throughout at least the next decade. But believe it or not, the BOSH project, I don't want to say, just kind of scratches the surface on juniper encroachment in the Owyhees because the BOSH was designed primarily to be like an early encroachment, you know, where you still have a brush component out there on the landscape. But there's a lot of areas in the Owyhees that are not included in that 617,000 acre project area that still needs, that needs some help quite frankly. You know, perhaps they've crossed a threshold and you need to do a system reset like, you know, just a landscape prescribed burn. So in the fuels program here, at least on the Boise district, yeah, BOSH is certainly not the end all be all. It's definitely our biggest project right now, but we definitely have one eye on the future. There's a lot more work to do out there, and we're going to continue looking for opportunities to do that, whether that's a new document or what have you. And we'll definitely be working with our partners the whole way along through all that.

>> You know, while we're focused right now on the topic of juniper encroachment. We talked a lot on our tour about kind of invasive annual grasses and what are we going to do about that being the biggest issue in the biome? It's certainly on the doorstep of some of their best country out there Owyhee County. Some of it's already been heavily impacted by Medusahead and Ventenata and cheatgrass. And I was impressed by this partnership in their, they're already experimenting with some very targeted herbicide treatments to take out invasive grasses and talking about, you know, quote, defending and growing the core that they have out there, some really intact sagebrush country that is not just threatened by trees but also invasive grasses. And as we learn more about how to do that effectively, I think you'll see them incorporating that into their prescriptions.

>> And I'm really glad you brought that up, Jeremy. That is, that is a very good point. I like to call it is, yeah, one thing that I would certainly like to do once BOSH is quote/unquote done is, I call it the canon of conservation. Just turn the canon of conservation squarely on those invasive annual grasses. Because realistically, you know, one of the main control methods on that is chemical, aerial chemical. And if you have this forest out there, this juniper forest out there, it will be intercepting a lot of, you know, a lot of that chemical on its way to the ground. So treat the trees first, either burn them or let the needles fall off, and then you're set up pretty well to really tackle that invasive annual grass issue. So thanks for bringing that up, Jeremy.

>> And I think you're right that the general approach to management of shrub step rangelands has changed somewhat. You know, the USGS shop out of Boise published, I think in 2018, a pretty significant manual essentially on various sagebrush treatments to limit fire risk. And here we're talking about doing mechanical control of juniper, not to eliminate fire risk but to, but to manage it and to try to steer the lands in a way that will be beneficial for everything out there. We will put a link to the to the Life on the Range video and story in the show notes for this episode. I mentioned that's been out for a little while but not a long time. Steve, what has been the, what has been the reaction to this story so far?

>> It's been excellent, Tip. We've gotten a number of print publications to print our feature story. We've done some other podcasts in Boise on this project. And we've been getting several thousand views on the video so far. So, love to see more people share the video and the story and help spread the word about the benefits of this project.

>> Yeah, I'm excited to see the results. And we'll have to make a, make a visit over there the next time I go down. Connor and Jeremy, thanks so much for joining us to talk about this. This is really quite a, quite a significant project that I think will have application in other places. I was joking about sending the locusts further on, but we'll have to change the name from Bruneau-Owyhee if this spreads to adjacent states and other parts of Idaho.

>> Yep, Yep. No, I just appreciate the opportunity to come on and chat about it. I know I just get to in some degrees, be the public mouthpiece for the project as the, as the coordinator for it. But yeah, it's definitely a whole heck of a lot more than me. And I know Jeremy was able to see that this week. Yeah, just a whole suite of partners out here working towards one common goal. Really enjoy what I get to do, and yeah, appreciate the opportunity to get to tell that story today.

>> Yeah, I just echo that. Appreciate Tip and Art of the Range helping us get this story out and maybe inspire a few more communities to rally around this.

>> Thank you guys.

>> Thank you.

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