No beating around the bush: Sagebrush plants hold ecosystem together
ELKO — Sagebrush is a ubiquitous kind of plant. It grows in most Nevadans’ backyards, appears on the Nevada state flag and serves as a source of coals for grilling.
It is also a habitat for sage grouse and the subject of many recent conservation efforts.
Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources conservationist Gerry Miller, who has also worked as a Conservation Specialist for Nevada Department of Agriculture, has a strong sense of personal respect for and extensive scientific experience with sagebrush.
“Sage grouse is part of my job, sagebrush habitats are part of my job — and working with farmers and ranchers and miners and livestock people and communities,” he explained. “It is all about people making the difference on this landscape out here, and awareness.”
“I started here in 1980 in the Ruby Mountains Ranger District, and I am just about ready to wrap up the career after almost 50 years.”
During the Northeastern Nevada Stewardship Group’s Board of Directors Meeting on Jan. 9, Miller made an appearance to share his favorite facts about the plant.
For starters, sagebrush covers 165 million acres across 14 states, Miller said.
Miller said Brad Schultz, a colleague who works as a University of Nevada Reno extension educator, believes sagebrush may have over 250 subspecies due to how the plants interbreed in the wild.
Five species of note include “big sagebrush, which we see here in most of our gullies and wet areas like Eight Mile Creek,” as well as mountain, Wyoming, black and low sagebrush.
“The low sagebrush is the one that we’ve had the roughest time on getting to reseed and re-propagate,” Miller said.
According to Miller, while sagebrush is a member of the sunflower family, it lacks the showy flowers common to its relatives. It depends on insects, rather than wind, for pollination.
“Sagebrush are relatively short in stature, usually less than 2 feet tall,” Miller said.
100 years old
They can also live a long time, he said. In the UNR plant research program, “we caught them and counted the rings. We had many over 100 years old.”
“Sagebrush is the foundation of an iconic landscape that supports a rich tapestry of wildlife and rugged western culture,” Miller explained.
“You walk through it, and obviously you got spiders in your face and you are walking through it and wondering what the heck’s going on. You’re looking at the wood tips, the birds are flushing out underneath your feet, jackrabbits are running out, you step in a badger hole,” he said.
“It’s amazing, all the different species that live out there, including us. We all have a built-in sagebrush habitat.
“So many of the wildlife species all require this. It is essential as part of the lifecycle,” he said.
For one, “sagebrush leaves, which are strongly aromatic and a shade of light green that seems to change with the weather, provide food to a variety of birds and fauna, which include mule deer, elk, pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep and jackrabbits.
“Several of these animals have an obligate or highly dependent relationship with sagebrush, including pygmy rabbits, sharptailed grouse, sage thrashers, sage sparrows, and the Brewer’s sparrow,” Miller said.
Additionally, he said “the greater sage grouse is a species that is completely dependent on sagebrush plants in every stage of its life cycle. They eat sagebrush leaves year round. As much as 70-75% of this bird’s diet is made up of sagebrush leaves in flower clusters.”
“And they dive in those snow banks in the wintertime and they just live underneath the snow, in a little snow cave,” Miller added.
‘A critical role’
“In the open patches between sagebrush plants, sage grouse return every year from March to may where they then mate and lay their eggs under the sagebrush.”
If sage grouse nest inside clumpy, bushy, young sagebrush plants, predators will be unlikely to spot them, Miller noted.
Beyond just improving the lives of animals, “healthy sagebrush plays a critical role in the hydrologic cycle of the West,” he stated. “In the summer, the plant’s taproots, which can extend one to four metes into the ground, help it to withstand dry conditions.”
“In wintertime these roots capture snow, retain moisture and support other plants by helping fuel the rivers which our urban communities rely on.”
As local evidence of this phenomenon, the deep roots of sagebrush are visible in the creekbeds of Peace Park.
Miller continued sharing even more ecological benefits of sagebrush. “Above-ground, sagebrush serves as a nurse plant, creating favorable conditions for other important native plants and allowing grasses to grow. And these plants feed a variety of wildlife as well as herds of rangeland animals like cattle and sheep.”
“How many leaves do they put out every year? They have a primary and a secondary, so they put out that secondary leaf in the springtime to catch all the sunlight and nutrients that they possibly can. And then as it dries out in June, it falls off,” Miller said, leaving “many heavier primary leaves underneath.”
“I don’t know of any other plant that does that,” he said.
Sagebrush habitat declines
Next, Miller shared details on the current scope of the plant’s growth. “An estimated 50% of sagebrush habitat has been lost in the Great Basin,” he explained. “Sagebrush is not in danger of extinction, however there is a growing concern regarding the fragmentation of habitat and loss of migration routes and feeding areas.
“Every time we build out in the suburban areas, every time we make a road,” he said, “something gets a little bit disturbed, just like when somebody does a doughnut in front of your house at night.
“When I go out in the Audubon Christmas Bird Count and take a look at some of these areas that I remember from 1980 and 1975, there are homes, there are roads,” he said, noting how much North Fifth Street in Elko has changed.
“A rapid increase in temperature and frequency of drought in the last 100 years has affected the health of native scrublands,”
Miller explained.
“While sagebrush is more resilient than most shrubs, we are finding that sagebrush is largely replaced by exotic annual grasses — medusa head, cheatgrass and ventenata — and other invasive plant species after wildfire and other disturbances occur,” he said.
“Some areas, if we have resilience built into it, and the fires have not been too frequent or disturbance has not been too frequent, many times these come back, but boy, if we get two or three fires in five years, that is a tough battle.
“But sometimes if you just have a fire every 50 years, every 75 to 100 years, there is enough resilience built into it.”
The frequency of burns is what makes a difference in the plants’ survival, Miller said.
Nature’s steward
To expand on the topic of sagebrush survival, Miller shared the scientific achievements of a special friend of his.
Miller met research associate Kent Mcadoo while working at UNR. Mcadoo lived from 1949 to 2018. “Dedicated to the stewardship and natural resources in Nevada and beyond, Kent’s affection for people was evident in the ways he always made time to listen to a story or share his own. He was a teacher in every sense of the word, captivating his audience with his vast knowledge via presentations, journal articles and life lessons.
“We miss Kent’s wit, infectious laugh, love of music, sagebrush habitat, collaboration, friendship, and most of all time spent in his presence,” Miller said.
Also, Mcadoo came up with the idea of establishing “shrub islands” to build up sagebrush habitat after fires. He passed this concept on to others in hopes of shaping the future of plant conservation. Miller said Schultz, a “good partner of both of ours, kind of decided to take it on because there was a Forest Service-funded grant and we wanted to get it to the finish there.”
“Successfully planning sagebrush from seed is challenging, especially on lower precipitation sites,” Miller explained.
Miller said it is possible, however, to curate “sagebrush islands that become seed sources and accelerate vegetation recovery.”
While sagebrush seeds naturally disperse in late fall or early winter, “artificial seeding on snow has been successful in many areas,” Miller said.
“Sagebrush seeds tend to germinate where snow accumulates,” he added. “We planned to use cut sagebrush plants both as a source of sagebrush seed and as a means of trapping snow for enhanced germination and accumulation of leaves.”
The objective of the Great Basin Native Plant Project study was to evaluate the fall placement of sagebrush plants growing on a burn site, where the sagebrush would serve as a collector of snow and a source of seeds.
“For the establishment treatments within three newly burned sites in Northern Nevada, basically 30 to 60 kilometers apart and having variable elevation, topography and soils, they used a randomized block study design with five blocks at each site,” Miller said.
“Within each block, three 15-meter blocks were randomly selected for either cut shrubs, broadcast ceiling, or no treatment at all. At each of the cut shrub plots, they placed Wyoming sagebrush stems harvested just before seeds ripened in November 2016.”
Next, the research team broadcasted sagebrush seed onto the seed plots.
Promising experiment
By spring 2017, new growth became evident. Mcadoo visited the Northeastern Nevada Stewardship Group to say he found the experiment promising.
It was common for the research team to find sagebrush seeds scattered in the direction of the wind, Miller explained.
“A summary of first-year results says for senior survival and cut shrub plots, the plant variable was significantly higher at each of the sites than in broadcast seeded plots,” Miller said of sagebrush findings for the year 2017.
He explained how Great Basin Native Plant Project studies continued: “They wanted to establish additional plots at least three new wildfires sites during November 2017.”
“Preliminary results indicate potential utility of this technique, where established sagebrush islands could serve as a seed source for successional recovery of critical sites over time.”
Also, later experimentation found “sagebrush can be readily and inexpensively established by placement of seed laden sagebrush branches.”
Soon, the Elko community became involved in the sagebrush growth process. At South Fork Recreation Area, “20 scouts and families built 22 caches in three hours for a total of $100 worth of materials,” Miller said.
So, the figurative seed of ideas Mcadoo planted led to many valuable findings on how exactly sagebrush can grow and spread their literal seeds.
Miller’s discussion of his beloved species inspires a sense of awareness for the plants that hide in the foreground, holding the ecosystem together in many ways that do not always receive full recognition. Nevada would not be Nevada without sagebrush.