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A neutral landscape approach to evaluating the umbrella species concept for greater sage-grouse in northeast Wyoming, USA

Metadata Updated: November 20, 2025

Greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) has been identified as a potential umbrella species with the assumption that conservation of their habitats in sagebrush ecosystems may benefit multiple other wildlife species, but co-occurrence with an umbrella species does not necessarily guarantee species will respond positively to management for sage-grouse. This may be particularly true for ecotones, such as at the eastern edge of the sage-grouse range where sagebrush steppe and Great Plains grasslands intersect. We used a novel application of neutral landscape models (Etherington et al., 2015) to evaluate observed and expected overlap between greater sage-grouse habitat (1994-2010; Fedy et al., 2014) and distribution of eight grassland songbird species (2008-2018; Monroe et al., 2021) in northeast Wyoming. Data formatting necessary for this analysis produced 17 rasters including sage-grouse habitat (nestGRSG300.tif and summerGRSG300.tif), songbird species distribution (grspFP300.tif, holaFP300.tif, larbFP300.tif, laspFP300.tif, loshFP300.tif, vespFP300.tif, wekiFP300.tif, wemeFP300.tif), songbird community metrics (total density and richness) thresholded at the 0.5 (abund_50_300.tif and rich_50_300.tif), 0.75 (abund_75_300.tif and rich_75_300.tif), and 0.9 quantiles (abund_90_300.tif and rich_90_300.tif), and a general mask to constrain simulations to pixels with songbird predictions (mask300.tif). We also include rasters for grasshopper sparrow (Ammodramus savannarum), sage-grouse nesting habitat, and associated masks but with pixels aggregated to 90 meters, 150 m, 450 m, and 600 m to evaluate sensitivity of results to raster resolution. Finally, in code.zip we provide example Python code to simulate neutral landscape models (nlm_umbrella_larb_habitat.py) and R code to determine the spatial autocorrelation parameter (h) for sage-grouse nesting and summer (brood-rearing) habitat using semivariograms (h_parameter_code.R).

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

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Dates

Metadata Created Date September 14, 2025
Metadata Updated Date November 20, 2025

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOI USGS DCAT-US

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date September 14, 2025
Metadata Updated Date November 20, 2025
Publisher U.S. Geological Survey
Maintainer
Identifier http://datainventory.doi.gov/id/dataset/usgs-635c09bdd34ebe442504b1d6
Data Last Modified 2023-03-20T00:00:00Z
Category geospatial
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 010:12
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://ddi.doi.gov/usgs-data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id 70fb62d9-5378-41d1-8ca6-9306b2c4b0f9
Harvest Source Id 2b80d118-ab3a-48ba-bd93-996bbacefac2
Harvest Source Title DOI USGS DCAT-US
Metadata Type geospatial
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 3f81b8e0990b7138197c8906966752095de309714f8fe55ce20e682183e2b0aa
Source Schema Version 1.1

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