ORTWS Chapter Awards

We are pleased to announce the winner of the 2025 Conservation Award - Jacqueline Cupples, USFWS

Jackie has advanced wildlife conservation through her work co-developing the Threat Based Land Management decision framework for uplands and riparian systems, and through her proactive leadership in initiating a research project on the use of communication towers by avian predators of the sage-grouse to improve siting and mitigation of future projects. Threat based land management: Due to extensive habitat loss and population declines, sage-grouse occupy about half of their historical range in the U.S. and Canada.

In Oregon, juniper trees, wildfires, and aggressive invasive grasses and weeds have disturbed its habitat. Jackie was a key partner in developing a conceptual ecologically based framework for merging the needs of sensitive wildlife species with ecosystem management imperatives using state-and-transition theory centered on the primary threats to the sagebrush ecosystem. The Upland Threat Based Land Management manager’s guides and decision support tools are used as the basis for habitat management for greater sage-grouse the CCAAs covering nearly 2.9 million acres of sage-grouse habitat in seven Oregon counties.

Threat based land management also provided the foundation for remotely sensed ecostate maps, which now cover and are in use across the sagebrush biome in the western US, an area over 175 million acres. The effort underpinned by this framework has also attracted over $19 million in conservation resources to support implementation of CCAAs in Oregon. Jackie saw a need to expand the threat-based land management framework into riparian areas, which are associated with streams, rivers, creeks and wetlands, and which support 80% of wildlife in arid rangelands but comprise only about 2% of sagebrush landscapes. She helped lead the development of a similar assessment tool for riparian areas within CCAA lands. She co-developed manager’s guides and conducted field trainings targeting natural resource professionals who lack formal training in riparian and stream ecology and evaluation techniques. Rangeland professionals are responsible for the health of riparian zones within their management areas despite a lack of extensive formal training. The framework is now used in Oregon across 2.9 million acres with the training programs reaching 179 people who are responsible in some capacity for managing over 22 million acres. The threats to the sage-grouse are largely habitat based, and through these conservation efforts, Jackie is helping land managers strategically prioritize areas for conservation to stop the continued loss of sage-grouse habitat. Avian Predator Occupancy and Diet at Communication Sites in Sage-Grouse Habitat: Studies have shown that sage-grouse avoid tall structures and both transmission lines and cellular towers have been linked to lower demographic rates and lek abandonment. These structures facilitate nesting and perching of avian predators of sage-grouse and their nests. While assessing the potential impacts of a single communication tower in Oregon, Jackie realized there was an enormous knowledge gap related to impacts on sage-grouse and other species in the sagebrush ecosystem. So, she reached out to agency and university colleagues and began assembling a team to synthesize existing and collect new data to generate science-based siting and mitigation information. Jackie continues to lead the collaborative research group that emerged and expanded to include volunteer data collection from several state and federal agencies. Research products from this effort have included a long-term sage-grouse lek trend analysis associated with tall structures, creation of an accurate GIS product and ground validation of all communication tower locations throughout the sage-grouse distribution in the U.S., and field research documenting raptor and raven nesting on all communication towers within 12.5 km of a sage-grouse lek in the Great Basin, Snake River Plain, Wyoming Basins, and Powder River Basin of CA, CO, ID, MT, NV, OR, UT, and WY. In addition, field research promoted by Jackie during this project documented raven consumption of 117 vertebrate species (including species of conservation concern; e.g., loggerhead shrike, pygmy rabbit, sage-grouse, etc.) through genetic analysis of diet. This research aims to benefit sage-grouse and sagebrush wildlife conservation as it will inform siting and mitigation requirements for future development projects.