The Sagebrush Sea Is Vanishing

The Sagebrush Sea is disappearing at a devastating pace and scale—but we have a plan. Spanning Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming, The Nature Conservancy’s Sagebrush Sea Program is an unprecedented effort to coordinate conservation across this vast and threatened landscape.

Once stretching nearly 500,000 square miles from the Dakotas to California, the Sagebrush Sea offered boundless skies, blue-green sage, and sweeping plains dotted with lupine and bunchgrass. These lands have sustained Indigenous peoples for millennia, tempted pioneers, and birthed cowboys. It’s a landscape marked by both hope and hardship, resilience and conflict.

This is a moment to act. Conserving the Sagebrush Sea means protecting a legacy—and a future. It’s a chance to revive our ecological core, support working lands, and sustain the wild character of the West.

The Four Pillars of TNC’s Sagebrush Sea Program

Our conservation work is built around Upland Restoration, Riparian Restoration, Grazing Management, and Large Landscape Protection.

One striking sign of success: biologists counted 45 male sage-grouse on leks this spring—the highest number since the project began—at a site once on the brink of collapse. High-resolution remote sensing and advanced ecological modeling helped guide treatments to where they mattered most.

"To walk out in the field this spring and see it come back to life—it was very gratifying," Munn said.

This project offers something rare and powerful: evidence that large-scale restoration in the Sagebrush Sea can work. With the right partnerships, strong science, and sustained commitment, even long-damaged land can recover.

Across the West, streams that once nourished the land now dry out faster and stay dry longer, threatening livelihoods and wildlife as hotter, drier conditions take hold. Restoring these waterways is among the region’s greatest conservation opportunities.

The Nature Conservancy is advancing restoration through Low-Tech Process-Based Restoration (LTPBR). Using simple materials—posts, rocks, willows, and sagebrush—crews mimic the work of beavers to slow and spread water, reconnect floodplains, and rebuild wetlands in arid landscapes. What makes this approach unique is its simplicity, accessibility, and proven cost-effectiveness across large scales: modest interventions can yield profound results.

In Colorado’s Yampa and White River basins, Joe Leonhard and his team have used these techniques to transform parched channels into wet meadows, creating habitat for wildlife while improving forage and water security for ranchers. 

“It’s easy to overlook the smallest streams,” Leonhard notes. “Yet by restoring them across the West, we are building resilience and transforming landscapes.”

Riparian restoration in the Sagebrush Sea shows that even in an era of drought and rising temperatures, rivers can be renewed—and with them, the wildlife and communities that depend on them.

By focusing on the needs of the ecosystems and, in particular, the needs of important deep-rooted perennial bunchgrasses, we believe there are ways to change public lands grazing permits that benefit livestock operators and the landscapes on which they work.

Today, the dynamic between people and the Sagebrush Sea remains complex. Large, working ranches and extensive livestock grazing allotments on public lands play a major role in the health of this ecosystem. The Bureau of Land Management alone is responsible for 78 million acres of sagebrush habitat. Grazing currently occurs on most of our public lands.

For ranch operators, the shrinking Sagebrush Sea impacts their daily lives. Invasive species puts them at greater risk for wildfire and reduces healthy livestock forage. Yet ranchers face a serious challenge: how to adapt grazing practices to bolster an ailing landscape in a way that accounts for climate change and makes economic sense. And federal agencies, often with few resources and limited capacity, are trying to manage thousands of grazing leases, many of which are inflexible and not designed to cope with the scale of the crisis.

TNC owns or partners with ranches covering millions of acres across the West. Landowners and public land agencies are some of our best partners in the race to reverse the decline of sagebrush. Using working ranches as living laboratories, the goal is to develop new models for well-managed grazing.

Among the tools being tested is virtual fencing, an emerging technology that allows land managers to control where livestock graze. This approach can improve rangeland health by reducing pressure on sensitive areas, increasing flexibility for ranchers, and cutting down on the environmental footprint of fencing infrastructure.

How are we doing this? By using conservation easements, which are one of the most powerful, effective tools available for the permanent protection of private lands in the United States. An easement is a voluntary agreement by a landowner that prevents development and protects natural values of the land.

For example, TNC worked with the Tanner, Christiansen and Pugsley families to secure easements on properties encompassing nearly 10,000 acres in northwest Utah. Funded in part by the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the transactions protect some of the state’s best remaining sage-grouse habitat on private land.

This idea, that livestock operators and wildlife can live in harmony with good stewardship practices, rings true throughout the West. In Montana, using funds from the Sage-Grouse Initiative, TNC collaborated with two ranches in the High Divide to provide socio-economic and ecological benefits on over 45,000 acres of sagebrush grasslands. And in other communities throughout the Sagebrush Sea, there is ongoing work with public and private partners to provide resources to help landowners improve their management practices and restore degraded habitat.

Sometimes, development impacts to wildlife habitat can’t be avoided, so it's important we work with partners to develop programs to help offset—or mitigate—the impacts by protecting or restoring land in different locations or offering financial compensation for the new disturbance that can be used on restoration, protection or land acquisition elsewhere. For example, TNC helped design Oregon’s sage-grouse mitigation program to steer energy development away from sensitive breeding areas.

In the American West, consensus on land, water and wildlife issues is rare. The sheer number of stakeholders, with diverse motivations and complex connections to the land, makes for a melting pot of opinions and agendas. Yet, the plight of the Sagebrush Sea and its importance to rural communities and to wildlife like the greater sage-grouse is a proving a powerful catalyst for unity. Using TNC’s deep, West-wide relationships, and 70-year track record of land protection, we are scoring big, on-the-ground wins for people and nature.

The People Behind the Program

TNC scientists work diligently to restore, manage and protect the Sagebrush Sea. Meet the experts who are devoting their careers to this iconic and expansive landscape.

Sagebrush Conservation Team

• Sean Claffey, Southwest Montana Sagebrush Conservation Coordinator
• Maggie Eshleman, Wyoming Restoration Scientist
• Jessie Griffen, Restoration Project manager
• Liz Munn, Resilient Public Lands Strategy Director
• Corinna Riginos, PhD, Wyoming Science Director

For all media inquries, please contact Tracey Stone at tstone@tnc.org.