Sagebrush Focal Areas for Greater Sage Grouse Conservation

This dataset delineates Sagebrush Focal Areas (SFAs), a refined subset of the most critical Greater Sage Grouse habitat identified by the US Fish and Wildlife Service in 2014. It was created by the Bureau of Land Management's Idaho State Office in 2015 as a further refinement of national data to support the Idaho and Southwestern Montana Greater Sage Grouse Environmental Impact Statement. The SFAs are managed as Priority Habitat Management Areas and include some non-habitat parcels on BLM and USFS lands.

Use Cases

• Identifying priority zones for sage grouse habitat conservation and management actions.
• Informing land-use planning and environmental impact statements for projects within the Idaho and Southwestern Montana sub-region.
• Analyzing the spatial distribution of critical habitat relative to land ownership (BLM/USFS).

Strengths

• Based on authoritative source data from the US Fish and Wildlife Service's 'Highly Important Landscapes' (October 2014).
• Refined by the BLM's Idaho State Office with documented processing steps for specific regional planning.
• Cross-platform presence on Data.gov signals its importance for public land management.

Limitations

• Key technical details like row count, column names, and exact file size are unavailable from the provided sources.
• The dataset does not include all Priority Habitat Management Areas (PHMA) for the Idaho and Southwestern Montana sub-region and excludes SFAs in SW Montana and the USFS Raft River Unit in Utah.
• Contains some non-habitat areas within the SFA boundaries, which may require additional data for pure habitat analysis.

Provenance

Source

Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Idaho State Office, with original data from the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Collection Method

Geospatial refinement of the 'SFA_Draft_January_2015_DIS' layer, which was itself a modification of FWS 'Highly Important Landscapes'.

Time Range

2014-2015

Freshness

2026-04-04 15:06:21.950278

Geography

Idaho and Southwestern Montana, USA (excluding SW Montana and the USFS Raft River Unit in Utah).