Click here for a fully referenced, detailed factsheet about the Sagebrush Sea. The factsheet includes interesting facts about the landscape, such as ...

• The Sagebrush Sea supports an estimated 250 terrestrial vertebrate species, including 100 bird and 70 mammal species.



• Increasingly rare big sagebrush habitat is alive with 94 bird species, 87 mammals, 72 spiders, 58 reptiles, 52 aphids, 32 gall midges, 31 fungi, 24 lichens, 23 ants and 23 beetles.



• Great Basin wetlands support 61 aquatic bugs, 19 endemic plant species and 5 endemic plant varieties, and 4 endemic vole subspecies.



• More than 350 plants, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and invertebrates in the Sagebrush Sea are of conservation concern. Approximately 20 percent of native flora and fauna in the Sagebrush Sea are considered imperiled.
  
  
• The Bureau of Land Management manages half of the Sagebrush Sea and does so with a budget that amounts to funding at $3.83 per acre per year.



• While the Sagebrush Sea spans more than 100 million acres, only two million acres are Congressionally designated Wilderness—less than two percent of the region.



• An estimated 4,100 communities rely on watersheds managed by BLM.



• The BLM administered approximately 18,000 grazing permits and leases to graze almost 13 million animal unit months on 165 million acres of public lands in 2006, primarily in the Sagebrush Sea.



• At least 46 exotic weeds occur in the Sagebrush Sea. Estimates of the rapid spread of weeds in the West include 2,300 acres per day on BLM lands and 4,600 acres per day on all western public lands.



• An estimated 107,457 new oil and gas wells will be drilled in Colorado, Montana, Utah and Wyoming in the next 15-20 years, primarily in the Sagebrush Sea.



• In 1999 range fires burned 1.7 million acres in the Great Basin and flames raced across the landscape at over 40 miles per hour.



• Up to 80 percent of remaining sagebrush steppe could be lost to the direct or indirect effects of global warming.



• European inhabitants, in only 150-300 years, "have brought about more profound changes" to sagebrush steppe "than all those of the previous 13,000 years."