Conservation Biology Institute is working in partnership with Riverside County Habitat Conservation Agency, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance Academy, and others to develop and implement a rangewide conservation plan for the Stephens’ kangaroo rat (Dipodomys stephensi, SKR), a tiny rodent native to Southern California’s shrinking grassland habitats.
The SKR Rangewide Management and Monitoring Plan, developed in collaboration with species managers, researchers, and land owners, complements existing management plans rather than replaces them, recognizing that each location has unique management priorities. Coordinating across local conservation efforts will facilitate collaborative conservation action across the species’ entire range.
The SKR Plan recommends management actions to improve habitat and ameliorate threats from human activities and climate change and provides a standardized monitoring protocol to track the species’ population status and trends. CBI has developed a customized field data collection application using ArcGIS Field Maps, and our SKR data management team supports the field monitoring effort and ensures long-term integrity of the data in partnership with USFWS’ Ecosphere Program.
This work builds upon a habitat suitability model developed in 2019 by Conservation Biology Institute using Sentinel-2 satellite imagery and being updated in time to support the 2024 monitoring season. These updatable landscape-scale habitat maps are the foundation for statistically-defensible monitoring and play a key role in planning coordinated conservation of the species.
This work is funded by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. For more information about this effort, please contact Wayne Spencer at wdspencer@consbio.org or Brian Shomo at bshomo@wrcog.us.
Please see the SKR Rangewide Management and Monitoring Website for The SKR Rangewide Management and Monitoring Plan and Protocol, as well as other documents, maps, and data from this project.
Stephens’ kangaroo rat (Dipodomys stephensi, SKR). Photo by Moose Peterson.
Cachuma Resource Conservation District (RCD) is working in partnership with Conservation Biology Institute, LegacyWorks, and Sharyn Main Consulting on the Regional Priority Plan to Reduce Wildfire Risk and Improve Forest Health in Santa Barbara County (RPP), which is a flagship project of the Santa Barbara County Conservation Blueprint. Funded by the California Coastal Conservancy, the RPP helps with the planning, mapping, and prioritization of projects that will proactively address wildfire threat in Santa Barbara County, as well as improve forest and habitat health.
The RPP is a multi-prong collaboration, which focuses on public and private land in the wildland/urban interface (WUI). CBI is the lead for a component of the project, to develop a sophisticated decision-support mapping tool to not only predict areas of high fire-risk on a landscape scale, but also help the community prioritize where fire risk mitigation projects should occur. The tool will serve as a community resource within the Santa Barbara County Conservation Blueprint and should improve communication, network building, and support community priorities through a regional approach to fire resilience and habitat health. The project team is talking with the many agencies and stakeholders involved, and facilitating the collaborative decision-making process.
CBI recently worked with the Pacific Marine & Estuarine Fish Habitat Partnership (PMEP) to update the West Coast Estuaries Explorer, a tool designed to engage a broad range of users with detailed information about estuaries along the U.S. West Coast. The first version of this tool was developed in partnership with PMEP and the North Pacific Landscape Conservation Cooperative. The partnership between CBI and PMEP continues with support from NOAA and the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission (PSMFC). The Estuaries Explorer got several performance and design updates to make it easier to use and more visually engaging. In addition to the latest available information for estuary boundaries and biological habitats, the Explorer now includes aerial images for each of the estuaries in Washington, Oregon, and California. Later this year, CBI and PMEP will incorporate additional information on the location of eelgrass habitat and areas of tidal wetland loss. PSMFC has taken over long-term hosting of this exciting tool.
CBI is collaborating with the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest and the Klamath National Forest in their effort to conserve the Alaska yellow Cedar in its southern range, located in Southern Oregon and Northern California, where it faces extreme extinction risk due to climate change. Concerted conservation efforts are needed to develop and implement conservation and reforestation strategies, in order to manage forest tree species for sustainability in the future. CBI will help coordinate the collection of seeds from trees from 8 sites, tag and geo-reference each tree, gather information on the general health of these stands, and submit the seeds to the national seedbank in Fort Collins. In addition, current-year needles will be also collected from each seed tree for later genetic/genomics analysis by Richard Cronn and team at the Pacific Northwest Research Station of the USFS.
Alaska Yellow Cedar (Callitropsis nootkatensis) has an extensive range from Alaska to Northern California (Fig. 1). It is declining in the northern part of its range due to a combination of factors associated with climate change and is a rare species in the southern part of its range in California and Southern Oregon. These southern populations are relics that occur in isolated stands in sub-alpine zones in cool wet sites at higher elevation > 5000 ft (Fig 2). The species is currently under review for listing as a threatened or endangered species.
Update 12/18
CBI finished cone collections in September, 2018, from six populations across three sites in Southern Oregon and three sites in Northern California. Access to other sites was restricted due to the Klondike Fire burning in Southern Oregon. This completes the first systematic collection of mature cones from these southern populations.
We have recieved word from the US Forest Service, Bend Seed Extractory, located in Bend Oregon, that they have successfully extracted viable seeds. The next step is to send them to the National Seed Laboratory in Dry Branch, Georgia, USA. Once there, these seeds will be entered into the the national germplasm bank making these the very first entries for these relic southern populations.
Needle tissue that was collected from 10 trees at each site will be genetically analyzed by researchers at the USFS Forest Science lab in Corvallis.This analysis will help determine if these populations are genetically distinct sub-populations from their northern counterparts which will help guide conservation of this species.
The Rogue River-Siskiyou National forest office is planning to use some of these seeds to grow seedlings to test for certain traits such as disease resistance and drought tolerance. The hope is that seeds collected from these southern populations may be used for restoration plantings in the northern regions.
In the north, Alaska Yellow Cedar is a valuable timber species but has been declining as a result of the climate crisis.
Conservation of these southern populations may prove to be critical for the longterm management of northern Alaska Yellow Cedars on public and private lands.
Fig 1. Range map for Alaska yellow cedar.
Source: http://tidcf.nrcan.gc.ca/en/trees/factsheet/376
Figure 2. Current known yellow cedar locations in the Siskyou Mountains (CBI 2017)
Landscape connectivity is critical for species dispersal and population resilience. This project is part of the collaborative Landscape Conservation Design (LCD) for the Pacific Northwest coastal ecoregion and conducted in partnership with the North Pacific Landscape Conservation Cooperative. The goal is to identify connectivity pathways and prioritize corridors for 2-4 focal species West of the Cascades in Oregon and Washington. In Oregon, we will work closely with the members of the Oregon Habitat Connectivity Consortium (OHCC) for both the coastal and Willamette valley ecoregions of the state. The methods tested and refined in this project will feed into future Oregon-wide connectivity mapping.
To learn more and explore related maps and datasets, please visit the Data Basin gallery, “Connectivity of Naturalness in Western Washington“. The gallery includes outputs showing the structural connectivity (i.e. naturalness connectivity) for Western Washington.
These data can be used to help guide connectivity conservation efforts. They are the results from the pilot project comparing Omniscape (coreless) and Linkage Mapper (core areas) modeling methods. Extra attention was made to the data inputs and the rigor of the analyses so that the results can be applied, in addition to answering the driving research question.
Primary forests make up approximately one-third of the world’s remaining forests. Globally, they are grossly under-represented in protected areas and subject to industrial-scale logging and “sustainable forest management” that otherwise fragment intact areas. They face unprecedented threats from logging, mining, energy development, and climate change. British Columbia contains two globally important temperate rainforests with substantial primary and intact forest landscapes distributed from the coast (i.e. Great Bear Rainforest – GBR) inland (i.e., Inland Rainforest). Geos Institute proposes to map and assess conservation importance of the primary forests in these regions as a scientific basis for an international campaign aimed at protecting these globally important rainforests. CBI will support Geos Institute and partners in Canada to help map the area accurately, provide scientific input, and also do a carbon flux model for these primary rainforests.
In this project, CBI is a member of and also providing support to the Fort Bragg Headlands Consortium, with a mission to to help achieve environmentally sound restoration and development solutions that will improve the quality of life and economy for current and future residents of our Coast.
CBI’s major contribution to the Consortium is to develop and maintain the Fort Bragg Headlands web-mapping Gallery. Powered by Data Basin, this web-mapping Gallery is a feature-rich platform for local citizens, stakeholders and decision-makers to access publicly available spatial data (e.g. maps of streams, wetlands, hazards, soils, geology, etc.). This is timely, as Fort Bragg is currently making a significant Local Coastal Program (LCP) Amendment. Currently zoned Forest Light Industrial, these zoning changes will make the third of the city that was once a lumber mill into prime real estate zoned for profitable development. Fort Bragg is also figuring out how to deal with the remaining wetlands out there that still contain hazardous materials despite a first round of clean-up by the landowner. Providing easy access to data and maps will facilitate decisions that conserve the landscapes and biodiversity of the Fort Bragg region while bringing much needed development and jobs to sustain current and future generations. You can donate directly to this cause here.
Wildfires are a natural part of California ecosystems and play an important role in maintaining ecological structure and function. However, different fire regimes in the state have been altered due to past management practices, climate change, invasive species, and population growth and urban expansion. Given the potential for conflicts between fire management and conserving biodiversity and ecological functioning, solutions are needed to balance ecosystem health with human welfare and community safety.
CBI is partnering with Dr. Jon Keeley (USGS) and an international team of landscape ecologists, biologists, geographers and economists to study the factors that control wildfire activity in southern California, which experiences the largest number of housing losses to wildfire in the U.S. This work focuses on the role of different ignition sources, climate patterns, vegetation change, and housing location and arrangement in altering fire patterns and contributing to housing loss at the wildland-urban interface. Other topics of research include the effectiveness and effects of fuel treatments and prescribed fire in controlling large fire behavior; the role of homeowner practices, such as minimizing vegetation around homes and upgrading building construction materials to prevent house loss; and the relative importance of land planning decisions that could best minimize housing loss while preventing negative impacts to biodiversity.
While the research takes place primarily in southern California, the findings are applicable to other fire-prone non-forested ecosystems such as the Great Basin and the other Mediterranean-climate ecosystems across the world.
The results of this research are shared with management agencies like the National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service, in addition to local and state planners and policy makers, to identify the best strategies to increase community safety while minimizing effects on natural ecosystems.
nflicts between fire management and biodiversity conservation
Destructive wildfires are sudden, extreme events: In a matter of hours, both social and ecological communities are transformed by the loss of homes and lives, and change in natural vegetation. After such an event, residents take stock of their transformed landscape and environment, deciding to remain, rebuild, or move, while ecological communities restructure and regrow. These combined social and ecological responses to wildfire may present a ‘hot moment’ or ‘window of opportunity’ where governments, communities, and residents can take action to reduce the future exposure to disaster.
An interdisciplinary team of researchers, convened by CBI’s Dr. Alexandra Syphard, Dr. Miranda Mockrin from Northern Research Station, USDA Forest Service and Dr. Van Butsic, from the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, & Management at University of California, Berkeley, are examining the question “Do wildfires lead to transformative adaptation, reducing future wildfire risk or do they lead to entrenchment, as residents and institutions re-create hazard-prone environments?”
To examine this question, they will review national data of post-fire housing change (rebuilding, sales, new development, land subdivision) and investigate how social and ecological settings and impacts, as well as event characteristics, influence subsequent housing and ecological trends. They will also determine, at the household scale, how changes in housing patterns relate to the post-wildfire ecological setting and socioeconomic characteristics, determining adaptation or entrenchment.
Wildfire is an important ecological process in California, where a diversity of fire regimes shape the structure and composition of plant and animal communities. Fire regimes are changing beyond their historical range of variability, however, due to several factors, including past fire management, invasive species, land use change, and climate change. These changes not only threaten the integrity and diversity of biological communities, but affect human communities, too, as residential losses to wildfire have skyrocketed in the last several decades. Two of these drivers, land use and climate, are expected to change dramatically in the coming century, raising substantial concern about their effects on fire regimes and subsequent impacts to human communities and biological diversity.
CBI has partnered with University of California, Berkeley to develop and implement a scenario-based integrated modeling framework to quantify the relative importance of climatic and land use factors on current and future projected fire patterns and risk of structure loss for three study areas in California. Select research questions driving this project include:
1) How do patterns of fire activity vary by land use change and climate?
2) How does structure loss vary by land use and climate change?
3) How do these relationships varyby geographic region?
4) Given these relationships, how are large fires and associated structure risk likely to change in the future?
Results of the assembled model output will be distributed to appropriate stakeholders and Data Basin will host the mapped output data.