Both land and water resources are essential to agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley and other Mediterranean climates in California. These resources are under pressure from a variety of factors that have the potential to significantly affect the food production capacity of a region that contributes importantly to the food security of the state, nation and the world. The most significant challenges appear to be climate change, especially its impact on water supplies, environmental factors such as in-stream water needs, soil impairment, and urban development.
American Farmland Trust has partnered with the Conservation Biology Institute to undertake a spatial analysis to identify agricultural areas that are most at risk due to these challenges. Understanding how and where water supply shortages, soil impairment, urban growth or climatic changes may impact agriculture will contribute to the discussion of strategies for agricultural adaptation and conservation in the Valley.
This project will build on the successful effort led by CBI to identify areas where large-scale solar energy projects sited in the Valley would pose the least conflict to agricultural and environmental values (A Path Forward). As with the solar project, spatial analysis will occur at a broad Valley wide level, but with a finer grained analysis of at least two counties. A number of scenarios, representing different assumptions about physical and policy trends, will be done to further enrich our understanding of the future prospects of Valley agriculture. Input from technical experts and regional stakeholders will be sought throughout the process to help determine how to rank resource values and risks, and to help formulate future scenarios. We are now actively recruiting stakeholders to participate in the process.
The ultimate goal of the project is to encourage and inform a purposeful regional conversation about strategies that will be needed to meet the land and water resource management challenges and, thus, assure a productive and prosperous future for San Joaquin Valley agriculture.
CBI is assisting the US Forest Service, Region 1, with reconciling habitat conservation efforts with long-term forest resiliency planning in the northern Rocky Mountains. Partners include the Southwest Crown Collaborative, Montana State University, and the USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station. Conceptual deliverables include a framework for integrating the habitat requirements of threatened species into a forest restoration plan that recognizes the dynamic nature of forest ecosystems and the importance of large-scale ecological processes. More definitive deliverables include an analysis of how habitat composition and configuration has changed over the past 90 to 100 years, a plan for restoring the dynamic nature of forests at the watershed scale, and analytical tools to facilitate similar efforts in other areas.
This effort reflects CBI’s commitment to assisting in the restoration of western public lands, recognizing the importance of promoting resilient forests in the face of a changing climate, and the conservation of native biodiversity. Future implications would include helping federal agencies such as the Forest Service transition into an analytical model that views habitat as a critical but dynamic component of forest planning, one the requires intact, large-scale ecological processes for long-term maintenance.
Supported by the California Wildlife Conservation Board, CBI will be working closely with the Strategic Growth Council, UC Davis, and other agency staff to conduct a Regional Conservation Assessment (RCA) for two pilot areas in the state – Mojave Desert and Modoc Plateau – and build an easy-to-use, online assessment tool to evaluate potential conservation investments based on a set of standards developed by the Integrated Regional Conservation and Development program (IRCAD). RCAs are designed to provide a standardized and current assessment of the biological values and ecological conditions within each ecoregion in California serving as the important context to carry out more effective and ecologically sensitive development in the state. This project builds upon existing investment through the California Energy Commission’s statewide renewable energy planning efforts.
The Coyote Valley is a last chance landscape. The Valley, located within one of the world’s top 25 most important biodiversity hotspots, occurs on the south side of San Jose, California and is situated between the Santa Cruz Mountains and Diablo Range. The Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority, in partnership with CBI, assembled a team of local and regional scientists with the goal of integrating existing scientific information and knowledge to develop a vision and practical plan for achieving a fully functional landscape linkage through the Valley to avoid isolating the two mountain ranges while protecting extremely important valley floor species and habitats. The plan includes restoration of important wetland and uplands habitats, support for numerous rare and sensitive species, and protection of important water and agricultural resources.
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Conservation Biology Institute is working with the U.S. Forest Service and Oregon State University to develop the Climate Smart Restoration Tool (CSRT), an interactive web-based application that allows the user to match current seed sources with future climate conditions.
Natural resource managers must match the climatic adaptability of their seed sources to the climatic conditions of their restoration sites in order to better ensure successful long-term restoration outcomes. There is an urgent need to adopt climate-smart approaches to ecosystem management, but progress has been slow because landowners and natural resource managers lack readily available, site-specific information on which to act. Existing scientific information has been unavailable at the scale needed by natural resource managers and restoration practitioners.
The CSRT will be designed to (1) easily incorporate new scientific information (e.g., climate projections, physiological thresholds) and (2) allow users to select parameters of interest (e.g., climate change scenarios, and time periods). Climate associated with existing ecoregions and seed zones will be displayed so that natural resource managers can choose the appropriate seed source for their restoration site, or decide where seed from a particular source can be planted in the future. Managers will also be able to view spatial maps of current and future climate, seed zones, ecoregions, and other contextual map layers. The CSRT will provide the ability to download outputs of the tool to PowerPoint slides, PDF documents, and GeoTIFF files in order to share those results with others and perform additional analysis within desktop data processing environments.
Because of the uncertainty in climate change projections, the CSRT is primarily intended as a planning and educational tool. It can be used to explore alternative future conditions, assess risk, and plan potential responses. The tool allows the user to control many input parameters so the results are appropriate for the management practices, climate change assumptions, and risk tolerance of the user.
The CSRT will be implemented following the same method used to develop and publish the Seedlot Selection Tool (SST; https://seedlotselectiontool.org/sst/; Figure 1). We will develop a fully functional and widely available version of the CSRT using the latest open-source software and incorporating mechanisms for its long-term maintenance. We will work collaboratively with key stakeholders to ensure that the application is effective in meeting their needs, using a variety of mechanisms including webinars and targeted outreach.
Screenshot of the Seedlot Selection Tool (SST), a forest-centric tool that helps natural resource managers match forest tree seed sources and climate conditions at planting sites.
CBI partnered with The Applied Climate Science Lab (ACSL) at the University of Idaho (UI) to expand functionality and data integration between the Northwest Knowledge Network (NKN) and Data Basin. These improvements better enable users to explore and interpret climate-related data, and incorporate that information into their projects and landscape-level or regional planning efforts. Specifically, these improvements allow users to import THREDDS map and data services into Data Basin for visualization. THREDDS is a data hosting system often used for climate-related data.
CBI also created a conterminous US Climate Console that includes simulated climate change impacts on vegetation cover, carbon cycle and fire occurrence and displays both MACA climate projections and MC2 vegetation model results in a web application similar to CBI’s California Climate Console. The Climate Console lowers the barriers to exploring and interpreting climate projections and impacts, and makes this information more readily available for natural resource managers. This tool will enable managers to more easily incorporate near and longer-term climate projections into their resource management planning. It supports making decisions about when to plant restoration species on a site post-fire and areas that are likely to undergo significant longer-term impacts from climate change.
A Regional Conservation Investment Strategy (RCIS) is a voluntary, non-regulatory, and non-binding conservation assessment that includes information and analyses relating to the conservation of focal species, their associated habitats, and the conservation status of the RCIS land base. The RCIS program, which is administered by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, was created by state bill AB 2087. This conservation strategy is intended to guide conservation investments and advance mitigation in RCIS areas. CBI provided scientific and technical support to ICF International, who led the development of a pilot RCIS for the Antelope Valley in LA County. Implementation of this strategy is intended to sustain and enhance focal species and their habitats in the face of climate change and other stressors such as habitat loss and fragmentation.
CBI is providing science and technical support to assist the California Energy Commission (CEC) in planning the state’s future energy needs, which includes achieving aggressive renewable energy goals with minimal damage to natural systems. Building off of previous work completed for the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan (DRECP), CBI is working to improve access and transparency of scientific data, maps and analysis. As a subset of the work, CBI is supporting the Renewable Energy Transmission Initiative 2.0 (RETI). RETI, according to the CEC, “is an open, transparent, and science-based process that will explore the abundant renewable generation resources in California and throughout the West, consider critical land use and environmental constraints, and identify potential transmission opportunities that could access and integrate renewable energy with the most environmental, economic, and community benefits.”
CBI is developing additional data, models, tools, and technical assistance that align with statewide energy and climate change adaptation planning. This work extends the information and tools previously built for the DRECP planning region to other areas of the state particularly in areas with high renewable energy potential.
Climate change and related impacts such as drought and wildfire are growing concerns throughout the state. In response, CBI is developing additional datasets and visualization applications to put this information into statewide context. CBI will deliver this data and information to the CEC and other California State agencies.