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

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).