| This project found a relationship between Columbian Sharp-tailed Grouse lek counts and the rate
of change in land cover types and burned area within 4 kilometers of a lek between 1985 and
2018. A mitigating factor is the presence of Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) within that
nesting and brood rearing habitat. Geographically Weighted Regression analysis indicates
reduced lek counts in areas with increased fire area (r2 = 0.944), decreased sagebrush cover (r2 =
0.949), and low CRP area (r2 = 0.957). Additionally, we surveyed a wildfire impacted CRP field
using Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UAS) to create a high-resolution vegetation classification map
to compare with Sentinel-2 multispectral imagery. Support Vector Machines resulted in the best
classification accuracy across two study fields using UAS (0.798, 0.893) and sentinel (0.454,
0.439). The UAS habitat survey revealed increased cheatgrass and decreased sage and shrub
cover in burned areas (+14.4% annuals, -12.6% perennials and shrubs). |