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Federal Register / Vol. 86, No. 103 / Tuesday, June 1, 2021 / Proposed Rules initiate displays on the lekking grounds around sunrise, and occasionally near sunset, corresponding with times of decreased wind turbulence and thermal variation Sparling 1983, p. 41.
Considering the narrow set of acoustic conditions in which communication appears most effective for breeding lesser prairie-chicken and the importance of communication to successful reproduction, human activities that result in noises that disrupt or alter these conditions could result in lek abandonment Crawford and Bolen 1976b, p. 239.
Anthropogenic features and related activities that occur on the landscape can create noise that exceeds the natural background or ambient level. When the behavioral response to noise is avoidance, as it often is for lesser prairie-chicken, noise can be a source of habitat loss or degradation leading to increased habitat fragmentation.
Anthropogenic noise may be a possible factor in the population declines of other species of lekking grouse in North America, particularly for populations that are exposed to human developments Blickley et al.
2012a, p. 470; Lipp and Gregory 2018, pp. 369370. Male greater prairiechicken adjust aspects of their vocalizations in response to wind turbine noise, and wind turbine noise may have the potential to mask the greater prairie-chicken chorus at 296
hertz Hz under certain scenarios, but the extent and degree of masking is uncertain Whalen 2015, entire. Noise produced by typical oil and gas infrastructure can mask grouse vocalizations, compromise the ability of female sage-grouse to find active leks when such noise is present, and affect nest site selection Blickley and Patricelli 2012, p. 32; Lipp 2016, p. 40.
Chronic noise associated with human activity leads to reduced male and female attendance at noisy leks.
Breeding, reproductive success, and ultimately recruitment in areas with human developments could be impaired by such developments, impacting survival Blickley et al. 2012b, entire.
Because opportunities for effective communication on the display ground occur under fairly narrow conditions, disturbance during this period may have negative consequences for reproductive success. Other communications used by grouse off the lek, such as parentoffspring communication, may continue to be susceptible to masking by noise from human infrastructure Blickley and Patricelli 2012, p. 33.
No data are available to quantify the areas of lesser prairie-chicken habitat rangewide that have been affected by
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noise, but noise is a threat that is almost entirely associated with anthropogenic features such as roads or energy development. Therefore, through our accounting for anthropogenic features we may have inherently accounted for all or some of the response of the lesser prairie-chicken to noise produced by those features.
Overall, persistent anthropogenic noise could cause lek attendance to decline, disrupt courtship and breeding activity, and reduce reproductive success. Noise can also cause abandonment of otherwise usable habitat and, as a result, contribute to habitat loss and degradation.
Fire Fire, or its absence, is understood to be a major ecological driver of grasslands in the Southern Great Plains Anderson 2006, entire; Koerner and Collins 2014, entire; Wright and Bailey 1982, pp. 80137. Fire is an ecological process important to maintaining grasslands by itself and in coupled interaction with grazing and climate.
The interaction of these ecological processes results in increasing grassland heterogeneity through the creation of temporal and spatial diversity in plant community composition and structure and associated response of wildlife Fuhlendorf and Engle 2001, entire;
Fuhlendorf and Engle 2004, entire;
Fuhlendorf et al. 2017a, pp. 169196.
Following settlement of the Great Plains, fire management generally emphasized prevention and suppression, often coupled with grazing pressures that significantly reduced and removed fine fuels Sayre 2017, pp. 61
70. This approach, occurring in concert with settlement and ownership patterns that occurred in most of the Southern Great Plains, meant that the scale of management was relegated to smaller parcels than historically were affected.
This increase in smaller parcels with both intensive grazing and fire suppression resulted in the transformation of landscapes from dynamic heterogeneous to largely static and homogenous plant communities.
This simplification of vegetative pattern due to decoupling fire and grazing Starns et al. 2019, pp. 13 changed the number and size of wildfires and ultimately led to declines in biodiversity in the affected systems Fuhlendorf and Engle 2001, entire.
Changes in patterns of wildfire in the Great Plains have been noted in recent years Donovan et al. 2017, entire.
While these landscapes have a long history of wildfire, large wildfires greater than 1,000 ac 400 ha typically did not occur in recent past decades,
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and include an increase in the Southern Great Plains of megafires greater than 100,000 ac 400 km2 since the mid1990s Lindley et al. 2019, p. 164.
Changes have occurred throughout all or portions of the Great Plains in number of large wildfires and season of fire occurrence, as well as increased area burned by wildfire or increasing probability of large wildfires Donovan et al. 2017, p. 5990. Furthermore, Great Plains land cover dominated by woody or woody/grassland combined vegetation is disproportionately more likely to experience large wildfires, with the greatest increase in both number of fires and of area burned Donovan et al.
2020a, p. 11. Fire behavior has also been affected such that these increasingly large wildfires are burning under weather conditions Lindley et al.
2019, entire that result in greater burned extent and intensity. These shifts in fire parameters and their outcomes have potential consequences for lesser prairie-chicken, including: 1
Larger areas of complete loss of nesting habitat as compared to formerly patchy mosaicked burns; and 2 large-scale reduction in the spatial and temporal variation in vegetation structure and composition affecting nesting and brood-rearing habitat, thermoregulatory cover, and predator escape cover.
Effects from fire are expected to be relatively short term Donovan et al.
2020b, entire, Starns et al. 2020, entire with plant community recovery time largely predictable and influenced by pre-fire condition, post-fire weather, and types of management. Some effects from fire, however, such as the response to changing plant communities in the range of the lesser prairie-chicken, will vary based on location within the range and available precipitation. In the eastern extent of the distribution of sand shinnery oak that occurs in the MixedGrass Ecoregion, fire has potential negative effects on some aspects of the lesser prairie-chicken habitat for 2 years after the area burns, but these effects could be longer in duration dependent upon precipitation patterns Boyd and Bidwell 2001, pp. 945946. Effects from fire on lesser prairie-chicken varied based on fire break preparation, season of burn, and type of habitat;
positive effects included improved brood habitat through increased forb and grasshopper abundance, but these can be countered by short-term 2-year negative effects to quality and availability of nesting habitat and a reduction in food sources Boyd and Bidwell 2001, pp. 945946. Birds moved into recently burned landscapes of western Oklahoma for lek courtship
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