Klamath - Siskiyou Private Lands Conservation Assessment

Executive Summary

September 2003

In 1999, the Conservation Biology Institute (CBI) concluded a three-year conservation science assessment of the Klamath-Siskiyou ecoregion culminating in a report entitled "A Science-based Conservation Assessment for the Klamath-Siskiyou Ecoregion." Numerous ecological assessments were conducted and a spatially explicit conservation plan was proposed based on the analytical results for special elements, ecosystem representation, and focal species. While the entire ecoregion was considered for many of the analyses, the planning component focused primarily on the public lands portion of the ecoregion. Furthermore, some attempt was made to include aquatic considerations, but terrestrial issues overwhelmingly dominated the planning and assessment work.

Recognizing the aquatic deficiencies in the original work, CBI began building the necessary databases and geographic information system (GIS) models to evaluate aquatic integrity throughout the region. This initial aquatics work, primarily focused on the Rogue River basin, was completed in 2000. Further refinement and expansion is currently underway.

With both public lands and water conservation issues being integrated, the private lands component of the ecoregion was a remaining deficiency. Therefore, we began the first phase of a two phase private lands assessment in 2002. The objective of the first phase (the topic of this report) was to identify regional concentrations of conservation values on private lands based on many of the same attributes examined in the 1999 public lands study.

Conservation data sets that were used and covered the entire study area were:

• Key watersheds
• Late seral forest
• Median home value
• Physical habitat representation
• Potential prime farmland
• Protected areas
• Sensitive, endangered, and threatened species and habitats
• Serpentine geology
• Vegetational representation

Conservation data sets that were used and covered just Oregon were:

• Forest ownership and management
• Stream flow restoration needs by watershed

We offer two final products for the first phase. First, we identify 19 private land focus areas within the Klamath-Siskiyou that contain high conservation value based on an unweighted analysis of the various conservation data sets. Second, we offer the private lands GIS database with full instructions on how to query specific conservation data sets and how to produce alternative models for the region.

For more information, please contact James Strittholt.