Sage country read as bare sand at about 7 percent shrub cover, where real sagebrush steppe measures 15 to 40 percent. Sagebrush now sits on the ground’s true surface with about twice as many plants, roughly 20 to 30 percent cover nearby. Far slopes still looked sparser than they are when this landed; since November 5 the band from 110 to 240 m past the near shrubs no longer draws bare.
Open ground in the oak woodland and dry foothills is now a golden dry-grass sward with brown soil in its gaps, and sagebrush steppe is gray-brown grit with bunchgrass through it, with sand only where the ground is really sandy.
