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Evaluating Bighorn Habitat: A Landscape Approach, William C. Dunn

United States Bureau of Land Management: Staff Publications

This technical note describes a method that incorporates a landscape approach with the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIs) to measure habitat and impacts for Rocky Mountain and desert bighorn sheep and to rank potential transplant sites. A landscape approach, in which habitat is viewed from a large-scale perspective as an assemblage of patches, is used because: (1) bighorn habitat is naturally patchy due to the affinity of bighorn for terrain that is both open and mountainous; (2) fragmentation (i.e., increased patchiness) often is the most severe consequence of human disturbance; and (3) the proximity and distribution of neighboring bighorn …