Spring Creek seeding project aims to jumpstart crucial habitat
Submitted by editor on Mon, 12/22/2014 - 1:41pm
On a cold and windy morning in November, 45 men and women took to the hills in the Bodie Hills to plant as many sagebrush seedlings as they could in a two-day span. Besides the cold, the work itself was physically demanding as each seedling had to be planted by hand. What makes this story even more interesting is the fact that many of the people on those hills volunteered to be there.
“The best way to manually plant a sagebrush seedling is with a gas powered auger and planting each sagebrush seedling by hand. This is a very time consuming and tedious process, but everyone recognized how important this project was and they got the job done,” said Aaron Keller, Western Region Wildlife Outdoor Educator for the Nevada Department of Wildlife and volunteer coordinator for this project.
The 2013 Spring Peak Fire burned nearly 14,230 acres of crucial wildlife habitat. A majority of the area burned is designated as Preliminary Priority Habitat for sage-grouse. This habitat represented high quality sage-grouse and winter mule deer habitat with a majority consisting of productive sagebrush, bitterbrush, and perennial grass cover.
In an effort to help restore the area, volunteers and agency staff from NDOW, United States Forest Service (USFS), and the Bureau of Land Management took to the hills to manually plant as many sagebrush seedlings as possible. For two cold and windy days in November, staff and volunteers planted more than 6,000 sagebrush seedlings by hand.
The Spring Peak Fire area was a habitat that was dominated by native shrubs that were valuable habitat for sage grouse and mule deer. Often times when the native plant species struggle to re-establish after a fire, other plant species will take its place. Unfortunately, in many places the species best equipped to take advantage of a fire scarred landscape are invasive species such as cheat grass.
“We know that sage-grouse have nested within unburned islands within the larger burned area demonstrating the importance of shrub islands,” said Freese. “Planting seedlings in shrub islands will help with the vegetation recovery in the burned area providing pockets of cover and forage benefiting sage-grouse, mule deer, and other wildlife. Once established, these shrub islands will act as a seed source that would otherwise be unavailable as the dispersal of sagebrush and bitterbrush is limited.”
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