Thank you for that generous introduction. It’s a pleasure and a privilege to be here today.

I grew up in Boise, Idaho, and I served much of my Forest Service career in the West. For part of my career, I was based here in Salt Lake City as forest supervisor of the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forests. Later on, I served as regional forester for the Forest Service’s Northern Region in Idaho and Montana.

So I have worked closely with partners like the State Foresters, the BLM, the NRCS, and the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies in dealing with sage-grouse issues. These are complex issues, and I welcome this opportunity to discuss them with you and to learn more about them. I would like to thank the sponsors and organizers for holding this forum and for inviting me to attend.

Restoration Challenge

As you know, sage-grouse is a symbol of the American West. Greater sage-grouse is the largest grouse in North America. It is native to sagebrush-steppe habitat in 11 western states and 2 Canadian provinces. When sage-grouse populations do well, then we know that the sagebrush-steppe ecosystem and all the plants and animals that depend on it are also doing well.

But habitat loss and degradation have reduced sage-grouse to less than 2 percent of its original population. This is analogous to other natural resource challenges we are seeing around the country … loss of early-successional habitat for ruffed grouse and Kirtland’s warbler in the Upper Midwest, for example … loss of habitat for red-cockaded woodpecker and 28 other federally listed species in the South … I could go on. A Forest Service study in 2011 found that 27 percent of all forest-associated plants and animals in the United States, a total of 4,005 species, are at risk of extinction, mainly due to habitat loss and degradation.

The causes are many—altered fire regimes; the decline and degradation of long-needle pine ecosystems like ponderosa pine and longleaf pine; the spread of native pinyon-juniper and various kinds of nonnative invasive species; and the conversion of open space to developed uses. One overarching driver is a changing climate.

So the sage-grouse issue is part of a larger challenge for public land management agencies like the Forest Service: how to restore healthy, resilient ecosystems across the landscape. In the particular case of greater sage-grouse, the two main threats to sagebrush habitat are infrastructure from energy development in the eastern portion of the sage-grouse range … and conversion of sagebrush habitat to annual grasslands due to wildfires in the western portion of the range. The challenge is protecting and restoring sagebrush habitat so that we can keep the greater sage-grouse from being listed under the Endangered Species Act.

The Forest Service is working with BLM and with the states to that end. Together, we administer most federal lands in the West, and we are taking joint steps to conserve greater sage-grouse habitat on public lands.

National Strategy

As you probably know, we have developed a joint National Greater Sage-Grouse Planning Strategy. Under the strategy, we are coordinating agency decisionmaking for BLM and the Forest Service with sage-grouse habitat protection in mind. We want our environmental impact statements, our land use management plans, and our records of decision is to minimize habitat threats, so we are writing them with two goals in mind:

1. reversing negative sage-grouse population trends; and
2. achieving a neutral or positive population trend.

The BLM, working together with the Forest Service, has released a series of draft environmental impact statements on the effects of sage-grouse conservation measures on public lands. The public review and comment period is over, and we are reviewing the input we got. The five final environmental impact statements that include amendments affecting national forest management will contain two sets of proposed plan amendments, one for the Forest Service and one for BLM.

In addition, the Forest Service has developed draft  management direction for all 21 land and resource management plans in the range of the greater sage-grouse. We want plan revisions to contain new or revised regulatory mechanisms to accomplish two goals:

1. to improve our efforts to conserve greater sage-grouse and its habitat; and
2. to reduce the potential for sage-grouse listing under the Endangered Species Act.

Upon completion of our draft management direction, the states, tribes, and other cooperators will have an opportunity for review and comment. The Forest Service is also developing vegetation and grazing management direction to address threats to the sage-grouse.

Adaptive Management

As you know, sound planning and decisionmaking is an iterative process involving adaptive management, monitoring, and mitigation.

With respect to adaptive management, we are incorporating it into our plan revisions to help us meet our goals for greater sage-grouse. Adaptive management is aimed at eliminating or substantially reducing threats to sage-grouse and its habitat. The revised forest plans will contain triggers—a soft trigger and a hard trigger—for actions to address declining trends in sage-grouse populations or habitat. Soft triggers are for management changes at the project implementation level; hard triggers are for immediate actions to stop a severe deviation from plan goals and objectives for sage-grouse conservation.

The Forest Service will constantly monitor for changes in habitat conditions that might set off a trigger. We will also constantly assess whether a new planning process is needed to amend or revise a forest plan to meet our goals for sage-grouse populations and habitat.

Monitoring

With respect to monitoring, the forest plan revisions lay out the methods for monitoring the implementation and evaluating the effectiveness of Forest Service actions to conserve sage-grouse populations and habitat. We have two kinds of monitoring: implementation monitoring and effectiveness monitoring.

The first kind of monitoring evaluates the implementation of decisions to conserve greater sage-grouse and its habitat. The second kind, monitoring for effectiveness, evaluates whether Forest Service actions actually achieve the goal of conserving sage-grouse populations and habitats. We monitor indicators of sagebrush availability, human disturbance levels, and sagebrush conditions.

Every year, we will issue a monitoring report. Every 5 years, we will issue a monitoring summary report.

Mitigation

As needed, the Forest Service will follow a standard model for mitigating damage to sage-grouse populations and habitat. Under the model, our managers consider taking a series of steps:

1. First, we might be able to entirely avoid adverse impacts by simply not taking a particular action.
2. If we are unable to avoid any impacts, then perhaps we can minimize the impacts by limiting the actions taken.
3. If we can’t minimize the impacts, then we might be able to compensate for them in some way.

If any residual adverse impacts remain, then we can use compensatory mitigation projects to offset any damage and achieve our overall goals for sage-grouse. Compensatory mitigation will be durable, timely, and “additional”—that is, over and above what would have resulted without the compensatory mitigation project.

Based on our standard mitigation model, regional teams will develop specific mitigation strategies within a year of when a record of decision is signed for a revised forest plan. The Forest Service will also serve on the Greater Sage-Grouse Conservation Team to help develop a regional mitigation strategy, to collect monitoring data from the states, and to use the data to modify the regional strategy or recommend actions for adaptive management.

Fire and Invasives

As I mentioned earlier, sage-grouse habitat loss is partly due to wildfires and invasion by annual grasses. Conifer encroachment is also a concern.

As you know, the Forest Service has a strong Research and Development deputy area, and our conservation science is second to none. Our forest plans are all based on sound science, and we developed a science-based prioritization strategy for dealing with threats from wildland fire, invasive annual grasses, and conifer expansion into sage-grouse habitat.

We also formed an interagency Fire and Invasive Assessment Team to prioritize locations for fire use as well as for fuels and invasive species treatments. The team issued its final report in June 2014. Based on the report, we have assessed five priority areas of conservation, along with management strategies to maintain or conserve habitat.

Based on the management strategies, we developed partner assessments and treatment implementation plans. The Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest in Nevada and the Sawtooth National Forest in Idaho will contribute to local assessments of greater sage-grouse habitat as part of an interagency cross-jurisdictional team.

Role of Forest Plans

So that, in a nutshell, is the status of our forest plan revisions in sagebrush country. I have been in the Forest Service for my entire career, and I can’t remember a time when so many have devoted so much to the conservation of a single species. This forum alone is eloquent testimony to that.

The Forest Service is absolutely committed to doing our part, working with all of you here. I think you can see our commitment in the way we developed our new planning rule—and in the way we are now revising our forest plans. We are tailoring our plans to the right policies and the right conservation measures to reduce long-term regulatory burdens on stakeholders while still protecting and restoring sage-grouse populations and habitat for generations to come.

Thank you!