In a recent article on the plight of the Pinyon Jay, I mentioned a major new 550,000 acre Cedar City BLM Pinyon-Juniper deforestation proposal, the Indian Peak Watershed Restoration Plan, on the Utah-Nevada border. BLM’s scoping letter described:
“To better understand current ecological conditions, forecast future trends, and develop conservation strategies, BLM partnered with the Nature Conservancy to conduct a landscape-scale ecological assessment in the Hamlin, Indian Peak, and Mountain Home areas. This assessment evaluated how much the vegetation and ecosystem have changed from what would naturally occur under historical conditions.“
Various forms of TNC modeling have driven BLM and the Forest Service plotting of PJ deforestation and sagebrush killing projects across this region for nearly 20 years. Now I’ll try to shed more light on what this is doing to public land and wildlife habitat, followed by links to several TNC reports.
The modeling sleights of hand used in Ely BLM’s RMP development, subsequent Watershed EAs and land health assessments had escaped me for years. Why were Pinyon-Juniper (PJ) forests on the land being mapped as sagebrush communities? What was the basis for claims these forests needed to be wiped out to make the land “healthy”? Around the time of the 2012 BLM Cave and Lake Valley Watershed project, I began to understand that the Nature Conservancy (TNC) had developed warped models and vegetation categories that BLM heavily relied on in the new RMP and subsequent actions tiered to it. This set the stage for radical manipulation of native forests and sagebrush. An example is the Cave-Lake EA excerpt at the end of this article. Beware that your eyes might glaze over if you try to read all of it. But this is what poses as the science that’s being used to inflict major biodiversity loss across millions of acres.
The mid-2000s Ely BLM RMP (land use plan) was developed just after the 2003 Bush Healthy Forests Initiative was passed. Every crossroad and remote ranch was labeled an Urban Interface, and large amounts of fuels funds became available to agencies. Also in this era, the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) was buying up Spring Valley ranches, hoping to mine water to pipe to Las Vegas. SNWA had floated clearing vegetation on valley floors because of the water the plants transpire. Agencies seizing on fire as a reason for major manipulation projects started a bit before Sage-grouse became the hot issue, and huge funds were allocated to be spent on them.
TNC’s modeling was based on very short fire and disturbance intervals using range researcher estimates of fire intervals in Pinyon-Juniper sagebrush and other arid land communities. This resulted in predicted “Biophysical Setting” (BPS) ideal plant communities.
BLM claimed TNC’s modeled BPS plant cover was what was supposed to be present on the land, not what was actually growing there. By using very short fire intervals, the models predicted lands had burned too frequently to support PJ forests historically and in pre-settlement times. This ignored both settler history and archaeological evidence. TNC conjured up ideal sagebrush communities comprised of mainly of grass and sparse sage because the sagebrush too was claimed to have burned very frequently. In addition, three fire class categories were used in modeling: FRCC 1, 2 and 3. Any mature or dense woody plant habitat for sensitive species fell in the FRCC 2 and 3 categories and was deemed “uncharacteristic” and a fire hazard. The solution was expensive human manipulation to get to the modeled ideal – ignoring not only the wildlife habitat loss, but also the risk to arid ecosystems facing unpredictable drought, climbing temperatures, and weeds that love disturbance.
Here’s an illustration of what happens to a biodiverse big sagebrush community once modeling dooms it – from a TNC “Landscape Forecasting for Supervisors” power point used to sell officials on contracting with TNC to conduct their voodoo vegetation modeling.
The 2004 photo shows a complex mature big sagebrush community. On a 2004 May morning, there would have been a cacophony of Sage Thrashers, Brewer’s Sparrows, Sagebrush Sparrows or Vesper Sparrows (depending on elevation), a few Western Meadowlarks, and maybe even Gray Flycatchers and Loggerhead Shrikes – given the height and structural complexity of the sage. Common Poor-wills would have been calling at dusk. Sage-grouse would be nesting, their chicks near hatching. Pygmy Rabbits kits would be nestled in shallow natal burrows.
But then the gray clouds of TNC’s vegetation modeling descended and were used to justify burning off the sagebrush and replacing it with dense grass. End result: Sagebrush species habitat is toast for several decades.
TNC gets government contracts to do aerial mapping before “treatments”, plugs this into its modeling and predicts how much bulldozer chaining and ripping, pile and broadcast burning, bullhogging, seeding, and spraying should be done, and the cost. They later angle for contracts to do follow-up mapping of the resounding success of the project in wiping out woody plant wildlife habitat.
As time has gone by, these models have become more elaborate, filled with supposedly predictive “state-and-transition” diagrams (agency range personnel have developed their own version of this type of modeling) with lines between boxes going every which way.
TNC’s modeling efforts have gradually become more swaggering – predicting the future 30-50 years out with their crystal ball, and slapping a trademark symbol by the phrases “Landscape Conservation Forecasting” and “Future Forecasting”.
This shows ways to kill PJ and sagebrush – bulldozers ripping and chaining, chainsaw at the ready. The only question is whether the skull and crossbones symbol represents general plant killing, or poisoning trees and sage with persistent Tebuthiuron, or use of other herbicides to try to stop weeds moving into the torn land. TNC models appear addicted to herbicide use.
Then, on the left, is the desirable, characteristic, and undoubtably historical and pre-settlement vegetation community that’s certain to stop fires dead in their tracks and save Sage-grouse too — crested wheatgrass. That’s clearly a crested wheatgrass seedhead. It’s an exotic grass from Asia, bred in the US to be big, coarse cow food that aggressively excludes wildflowers, grasses and sagebrush from recovery.
The cost table below is from a 2023 TNC Future Forecasting report for the Utah Fishlake Forest Service’s Boulder Mountain project that also includes part of the Escalante District. This shows a cost of $1310 per acre to cut down trees, chop them into pieces, heap the wood in a pile, and set the pile of carbon ablaze; $500 per acre to masticate; and $200 an acre for landscape burning. Many agency projects are tens of thousands of acres. I have no idea what “water-table-uplift” is. It sounds kind of like a religious miracle, but perhaps it’s related to bulldozing meadows and dumping rocks in headcuts? The Fishlake Boulder project hasn’t been finalized yet.
These reports serve the BLM and Forest Service purpose of keeping public land ranchers contented by trying to generate more livestock forage. They feed into a lucrative treatment-industrial complex flush with internal agency staff, NGO partners, collaborative groups, and heavy equipment contractors. If chainsaws and hard physical labor are involved in the “restoration treatment”, the hard work may be done by exploited workers like pineros, overseen by contractors.
Variations on this modeling have become a key part of BLM land health assessments, diverting attention from livestock damage. The fact that there are trees or dense sagebrush present means it’s the plant’s fault that lands are unhealthy, not the cattle and sheep. BLM then uses its health assessments to further justify tree or dense sagebrush killing projects, as in the evaluation of the habitat standard for the 800,000-acre Ely BLM Wilson Creek EA where 100,000s of acres are identified as unhealthy and needing “restoration”:
“The Use Areas are lacking the grass and forb component … and are encroached with pinyon-juniper. This increases forage competition between big game, livestock and wild horses”.
BLM also calls the sagebrush “decadent”, a long-time range pejorative for mature sagebrush or ungrazed grass. In the Wilson Creek EA SNWA domestic sheep grazing decision, Ely BLM blames the trees for water loss: “The encroachment [of PJ] will also decrease the amount of water in the riparian areas, which is also a causal factor of the Use Area not meeting standards. BLM doesn’t starkly say we’re killing trees to get more water, but that’s what’s implied. Large-scale deforestation under the illusion of increased water abundance has been an underlying element of Utah’s Watershed Restoration Initiative, which has funded many TNC reports.
TNC has become the major player in developing a warped “science” in support of large-scale manipulation of native forests, sagebrush, and pretty much any woody plant community in the Great Basin and beyond. This has kept ballooning, far beyond Ely. The Landfire site with TNC’s Conservation Gateway portal is used extensively by BLM and the Forest Service, who rely on its information to generate a “need” to manipulate vegetation across vast areas of public lands. All the recent Forest Service Region 4 Fire EAs (hundreds of thousands of acres each) and big logging proposals use the site’s information.
This image dots Sage-grouse figures across steep slopes. Birds foolish enough to spend time on such slopes would quickly become a Golden Eagle’s meal. Steep slopes allow Eagles to swoop in undetected. TNC’s modeling fantasies are divorced from basic wildlife natural history and species biology.
Below are links to several TNC documents from agency websites. Hopefully they’ll help increase understanding of what’s behind the ongoing destruction of many beautiful wild places in the West. The wool is being expensively pulled over the public’s eyes with “watershed” and “restoration” projects derived from fancy models that result in the same old agency livestock forage and logging projects of the past. Even someone as technologically inept as me could spend a little time with Google Earth and figure out where an agency would want to “treat” (any place there’s some good tree or shrub cover habitat left) and guess the type of habitat destruction they would conduct.
Cave and Lake Valley EA Excerpt:
More Ely BLM Handiwork Based on the BPS Veg Modeling Scheme
Wilson Creek and surroudings. Ely Lincoln County Sage-grouse project. Roller beaten crushed sagebrush in foreground, with an expanse of Spike (Tebuthiuron) killed sagebrush in background. All choked with dense cheatgrass. BLM herbicided the sagebrush for miles around several Sage-grouse leks. When I pressed them on this habitat destruction, they said Oh, we just wanted to thin it – the contractor must have messed up and applied too much. Where’s “contractor messes up” figured into TNC’s crazed models?
TNC DOCUMENTS FROM AGENCY WEBSITES
Landscape Conservation Forecasting™ UPCD with Regional Partners Workshop.
Promotes some of the past proposed veg killing projects in Hamlin Valley and the Black Mountains. The Hamlin area has been battered with a slew of past TNC reports and “treatments”, yet Sage-grouse have suffered significant declines. I visited Hamlin Valley and surroundings nearly a decade ago and couldn’t believe how badly both the trees and sagebrush habitats were already being torn up with “treatments”.
Landscape Conservation Forecasting for Supervisors. A power point to sell agency leaders on TNC modeling. The date is uncertain, but TNC claims to have done this modeling for 9 million acres.
Boulder Mountain Utah Landscape Conservation Forecasting. Modeling schemes applied to everything from subalpine fir to sagebrush in an area of significant ecological concern. “The Boulder Mountain AOI is located in southern Wayne County (south of Highway 24) and Garfield County UT immediately west of Capitol Reef National Park and north of Grand Staircase – Escalante National Monument (approximate central location at 38o06’41.27” N, 111o39’09.54” W) and encompasses a total of 691,249 acres (279,739 ha). The entirety of the Escalante Ranger District of the Dixie National Forest and the southern part of Fremont River Ranger District of the Fishlake National Forest are within the AOI”. Hundreds of pages of manipulation modeling mania including grazing predictions too.
Scoping for a Fishlake Forest mega-project based on the Boulder Mountain report started in December 2024. https://www.fs.usda.gov/project/?project=67254 .
Landscape Conservation Forecasting. Report to Great Basin National Park.
Includes modeling of just about every plant community, and lots of treatments. As an example: “Return-on-investment, ecological departure, and high-risk classes for the limber-bristlecone pine mesic biophysical setting”. This is from 2010 and is a similar era as several Ely BLM watershed projects. Broadcast burning, herbicides, chainsawing, pile burning, mastication, etc.
Landscape Conservation Forecasting: Hamlin Valley and Black Mountains.
More modeling for more sage and PJ manipulation.
Application of climate variability forcing effects to Landscape Conservation ForecastingTM for Hamlin Valley and Black Mountains. 2018. What will happen when climate chaos – or the inherent unpredictability in the natural world – blows apart these TNC modeling predictions?
Landscape Conservation ForecastingTM Pine Valley and Mountain Home Range. More of the same, including“probabilistic transitions for ecological systems” and other highlights.
Landscape Conservation ForecastingTM Pine Valley Ranger District
Dixie National Forest
There is a pending Pine Valley Ranger District Forest Service Project. It was scoped in late 2024, and uses this 2014 report. See: https://www.fs.usda.gov/project/?project=67051 The Report is linked on the Forest site here: https://usfs-public.app.box.com/v/PinyonPublic/file/1800102085730
It’s replete with use of persistent “Spyke”/Spike (Tebuthiuron) herbicide to kill trees and sagebrush for many years.
Landscape Conservation ForecastingTM Pine Valley and Mountain Home Range
This throws wild horse grazing vs. livestock grazing effects on massive treatments into the modeling mix. Guess which is found to be worse for seedings. “The net increase of 22,000 acres represented at most 70% of planned implementation rates, because not all seeding attempts were successful in black sagebrush due to germination failure, different types of drought, and wild horse grazing during the regulatory no-livestock rest period. Toward the end of the simulations from years 2050 to 2077, the ACCESS1 LOCA showed 5,000 acres less area of BS-U:SI-A than both the CCSM4 LOCA and HISTORIC Climate”. And why would anyone believe TNC could predict conditions in 2070?
Landscape Conservation ForecastingTM for Washington County’s National Conservation Areas
More Ecological Departure modeling. Example: “Desert tortoise departure (%) and return‐on‐investment for desert tortoise departure (subscript DT) of blackbrush–mesic after 50 years simulating different management scenarios for the Beaver Dam Wash NCA. The MINIMUM MANAGEMENT scenario is not shown in the ROI graph because this scenario is used in the ROI calculation”.
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