Quiero saber acerca de...

29466

Federal Register / Vol. 86, No. 103 / Tuesday, June 1, 2021 / Proposed Rules
boom years. As the frequency and intensity of droughts increase in the Southern Great Plains region, there will be diminishing opportunity for boom years with above-average precipitation.
Overall, more frequent and intense droughts may lessen the intensity of boom years of the lesser prairie-chicken population cycle in the future which would limit the ability of the species to rebound following years of drought Ross et al. 2018, entire. These changes will reduce the overall resiliency of lesser prairie-chicken populations and exacerbate the effects of habitat loss and fragmentation. Because lesser prairiechicken carrying capacities have already been much reduced, if isolated populations are extirpated due to seasonal weather conditions, they cannot be repopulated due to the lack of nearby populations.
Although climate change is expected to alter the vegetation community across the lesser prairie-chicken range Grisham et al. 2016b, pp. 228231, we did not account for the future effects of climate change in our geospatial habitat model, as we did not have information to inform specific land cover changes predicted to result from future climate change Service 2021, p. 92.
The best available information supports that climate change projections of increased temperatures, increased precipitation extremes, increased soil drying, and an increase of severe events such as drought and storms within the Southern Great Plains are likely to have significant influences on the future resiliency of lesser prairie-chicken populations by mid to late 21st century.
These trends are expected to exacerbate the challenges related to past and ongoing habitat loss and fragmentation, making it less likely for populations to withstand extreme weather events that are likely to increase in frequency and severity.
Other Factors
jbell on DSKJLSW7X2PROD with PROPOSALS3

Livestock Grazing We expect that grazing will continue to be a primary land use on the remaining areas of grassland within the range of the lesser prairie-chicken in the future, and grazing influences habitat suitability for the lesser prairie-chicken Diffendorfer et al. 2015, p. 1. When managed to produce habitat conditions that are beneficial for the lesser prairiechicken, grazing is an invaluable tool for maintaining healthy prairie ecosystems.
However, if grazing is managed in a way that is focused on maximizing shortterm cattle production, resulting in rangeland that is overused, this could have significant negative effects on the
VerDate Sep<11>2014

20:04 May 28, 2021

Jkt 253001

lesser prairie-chicken. Grazing management varies both spatially and temporally across the landscape.
Additionally, grazing management could become more difficult in the face of a changing climate with more frequent and intense droughts.
Our geospatial model does not account for impacts to habitat quality as data needed to characterize habitat quality for the lesser prairie-chicken at the scale and resolution needed for our analysis do not exist. While data do not exist to quantify rangewide extent of grazing practices and their effects on habitat, livestock grazing will continue to influence lesser prairie-chicken populations in the foreseeable future.
Shrub Control and Eradication The removal of native shrubs such as sand shinnery oak is an ongoing concern to lesser prairie-chicken habitat availability throughout large portions of its range, particularly in New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. While relatively wide-scale shrub eradication has occurred in the past, we do not have geospatial data to evaluate the extent to which shrub eradication has contributed to habitat loss and fragmentation for the lesser prairie-chicken. While some Federal agencies such as BLM limit this practice in lesser prairie-chicken habitat, shrub control and eradication still occur through some Federal programs and on private lands, which make up the majority of the lesser prairie-chicken range. Though we expect this threat to continue to impact the species into the foreseeable future, we do not have data available to project the potential scale of habitat loss likely to occur in the future due to shrub eradication.
Fire As discussed in Threats Influencing Current Condition, the current lack of prescribed fire use in the range of the lesser prairie-chicken is contributing to woody plant encroachment and degradation of grassland quality.
As the effects of fire suppression continue to manifest throughout the Great Plains, the future impacts of wildfires on the lesser prairie-chicken are difficult to predict. If recent patterns continue with wildfires occurring at increasingly larger scales with less frequency and higher intensities than historical fire occurrence, there is an increasing potential of greater negative impacts on lesser prairie-chicken.
Additionally, as climate change projections are indicating the possibility of longer and more severe droughts across the range of the lesser prairiechicken, this could alter the vegetation
PO 00000

Frm 00036

Fmt 4701

Sfmt 4702

response to fire both temporally and spatially. An expansive adoption of prescribed fire in management of remaining grasslands would be expected to have a moderating effect on risk of wildfires and concurrently would reduce woody plant encroachment and increase habitat quality and diversity.
We are not able to quantify these impacts on the future condition of the landscape in our geospatial analysis due to lack of data and added complexity, but we acknowledge that fire both prescribed fires and wildfire, or its absence, will continue to be an ecological driver across the range of the lesser prairie-chicken in the future with potentially positive and negative effects across both short-term and long-term timelines in the foreseeable future.
Projected Future Habitat Conditions and Trends To forecast the potential changes in future lesser prairie-chicken habitat, we used the projected levels of potential future impacts from conversion to cropland, petroleum production, wind energy development, and woody vegetation encroachment. We also worked with the primary conservation entities delivering ongoing, established lesser prairie-chicken conservation programs to develop estimated reasonable projections for rates of future conservation efforts. We asked the entities to provide us with information to project three levels of conservation:
Low, continuation, and high. We asked the conservation entities not provide aspirational goals for a given program but instead to solely use past performance, funding expectations, and expert opinion to provide plausible future rates for given conservation practices. We then used this information to estimate future conservation efforts over the next 25 years for the lesser prairie-chicken.
The results of this future geospatial model Service 2021, Section 4.2 and Appendices B and C is provided in Table 14; further details and maps are available in Appendix E of the SSA
report. The median results show a very modest increase in areas available for use by lesser prairie-chicken in our nearest neighbor analysis under Scenario 1 assuming high levels of restoration and low levels of impacts with an increase for the Shinnery Oak Ecoregion and a decrease for the other three ecoregions and decreasing amounts of projected declines in areas available for use by lesser prairiechicken under Scenarios 25 Table 14.
Rangewide changes in areas available for use by lesser prairie-chicken in our nearest neighbor analysis range from a
E:FRFM01JNP3.SGM

01JNP3