The USDA Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) works with private landowners to advance conservation on their lands. This voluntary program currently comprises over 23 million acres making it an extremely important component of conservation in America, particularly in locations with limited public conservation lands. Management actions taken on enrolled lands include augmenting native vegetation for pollinators, providing habitat for grassland plants and animals, increasing biodiversity, reducing soil erosion, and improving water quality.

CBI is working with USDA to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the program as it strives to expand enrollment in the coming years. Working in several pilot states (Mississippi, Kansas, Colorado, Washington, Nebraska, and the Dakotas), CBI is focusing on the following tasks:

• Create an online service open to the public that assists landowners to identify plant mixes most appropriate for their locations and management goals and vendors where seeds/seedlings can be acquired.
• For agency and CRP contract holders, create an online service that helps manage emergency haying/grazing requests.
• Develop and implement technology and protocols (e.g., phone field assessment app) that will involve contract holders more in the implementation of their agreements, which will provide important monitoring for improved program evaluation.
• Improve mapping and monitoring of forests and grasslands as they relate to CRP goals and objectives using the latest remote sensing technology, machine learning, and high-end processing resources.
• Conduct spatial analyses to help the program prioritize areas for more targeted enrollment.
• For agency users, provide an online service that allows for rapid and meaningful assessments of conservation management outcomes on CRP lands.

CBI Takes a Field Trip!

CBI headed to Jamestown, North Dakota, to speak with producers and USDA county staff regarding the USDA Mobile App, a tool designed for self-reporting, assessment, and communication surrounding CRP fields. We tested the app on over 35 fields to incorporate feedback from on-the-ground users, train remote sensing data, and test the effectiveness and ease-of-use of the tool. We coordinated with USGS, as well, testing this app on several of their pollinator plots, in conjunction with another CBI project.

Additionally, CBI traveled to Bismark and spoke with state NRCS staff, in order to hone and edit management questions and expand the usefulness of the app for reporting requirements and data gathering. Our experience was invaluable, as truthful reactions and deliberate responses from those who will eventually be using the tool, are critical in creating something that will be utilized and, ultimately, successful.

A Framework Resource Management Plan (F-RMP) for the Montecito Ranch Preserve was developed jointly by Jessie Vinje, CBI, Michael White, Endangered Habitats Conservancy (EHC), Steve Montgomery, ECORP Consulting, Inc., and the San Diego Management and Monitoring Program (SDMMP) in coordination with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW), and the U.S. Department of Defense.  The F-RMP aligns preserve-level management and monitoring with the regional Management and Monitoring Strategic Plan (MSP Roadmap) for conserved lands in western San Diego County (SDMMP and TNC 2017).  The MSP Roadmap provides regional and preserve-level goals and objectives for prioritized species, vegetation communities, and threats, and includes recommendations from regional planning documents. Together with its partners, CBI developed the F-RMP over 2.5-years by compiling and reviewing existing documents, literature, and spatial datasets, conducting rapid assessment surveys for biological resources, and meeting with species and regional experts.

The Preserve is a 955-acre perpetually conserved property located in west-central San Diego County near the town of Ramona.  The Preserve is contiguous with the County of San Diego’s Ramona Grasslands County Preserve (Ramona Grasslands) and is located within the original Rancho Valle de Pamo (also called Rancho Santa Maria) Spanish land grant and on historical Kumeyaay land. 

Montecito Ranch lies within the North County Multiple Species Conservation Plan (NCMSCP), a draft NCCP area, but was originally slated for development.  EHC acquired the 955-acre ranch on June 10,2020, with funding from Section 6 of the Federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973, as amended.  Specifically, two habitat conservation plan land acquisition grants associated with the County of San Diego Multiple Species Conservation Program (MSCP) were awarded funding for the acquisition of land that complements the MSCP and benefits covered listed and unlisted species.  The California Wildlife Conservation Board (WCB) provided funding including the requisite non-federal matching funds for Section 6 grants and the U.S. Department of Defense provided 50% of the acquisition cost through its Readiness and Environmental Protection Integration (REPI) program, leveraged additional acquisition funding.

Montecito Ranch supports the federally threatened coastal California gnatcatcher (Polioptila californica californica), federally endangered San Diego fairy shrimp (Branchinecta sandiegoensis) and federally endangered Stephens’ kangaroo rat (Dipodomys stephensi) in addition to providing foraging and wintering habitat for raptors including golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos canadensis) and other birds, and habitat for reptiles, amphibians, and mammals including American badger (Taxidea taxus).  The Preserve supports vernal pools including the rare southern tarplant (Centromadia parryi subsp. australis), oak woodlands including the rare Engelmann oak (Quercus engelmannii), grasslands, coastal sage scrub, and chaparral habitats.

Helping dairy farmers choose climate-smart manure management systems for potential funding from the California Depart of Food and Agriculture through their Alternate Manure Management Program (AMMP)

The CDFA AMMP Project Planning Tool provides California dairy and livestock operators an opportunity to easily visualize an alternative manure management practice that reduces carbon emissions, using simple ways of mapping proposed operations on the farm. The Tool increases access for potential applicants to create maps describing their current and proposed manure management, thus improving their AMMP grant applications, and our ability to review projects efficiently. The CBI team did an amazing job communicating with us regularly, offering suggestions, and helping put our ideas and the rather complex elements of our grant program together into a really beautiful and user-friendly tool.

Alyssa Louie – Senior Environmental Scientist, California Department of Food and Agriculture

The Seedlot Selection Tool and Climate-Smart Restoration Tool are web-based tools designed to match seedlots with planting sites assuming that seedlots are adapted to the past climates in which they evolved, primarily with respect to temperature and aridity. The tools map the climatic match of seedlots with the past or projected climates of planting sites. The challenge is that future climates are a moving target, which means that seedlots must be adapted to the near-term climates as well as the climates of the mid- to late-21st century. Because climate projections are uncertain, the prudent approach is to aim for the warmest climate that may be expected while ensuring that seedlots moved from warmer to colder locales are not moved so far that they risk cold damage. Uncertainty in climate projections may be mitigated by ensuring genetic diversity through mixing seed sources and having collections from many parents per seed source. Three examples illustrate how to effectively use the web tools: (1) choosing seedlots targeting different future climates for a mid-elevation Douglas-fir site in the Washington Cascades, (2) finding current and future seed sources for restoration of big sagebrush after fires in the Great Basin and Snake River Plain, and (3) planning to ensure that a Douglas-fir seed inventory includes seedlots suitable for future climates in western Oregon and Washington.

Our study indicated that the biological and ecological values of the Klamath-Siskiyou ecoregion can be enhanced by a conservation plan that integrates a broader set of conservation criteria than those considered in current management plans. Most strictly protected reserves in the region (e.g., wilderness areas) were established for scenic and recreational reasons and poorly represent the range of habitats available. The Northwest Forest Plan offered what appeared to be a modest improvement in conservation status, but its long term contribution to conservation remains unknown. Not only were the late successional reserves established under the Plan based on limited criteria, many of them do not appear to be of the highest value. For example, some contain little late-seral forest and are heavily fragmented. Furthermore, these “reserves” have been open to logging, even of old growth, and some are now being proposed for intensive development.

The purpose of this project was to create a GIS-based model that identifies specific focal areas throughout the range of the redwoods. Focal areas were defined as zones that offer the best conservation opportunities for long-term protection and maintenance of the redwood ecosystem based on current conditions. GIS was utilized because of its spatially explicit architecture and advanced analytical capability.

This model was produced for Save-the-Redwoods League as part of their overall Master Plan – an organizational blueprint for protecting the redwood ecosystem. More specifically, this model was intended to help the League target their future proactive conservation planning efforts more effectively as part of their overall conservation mission while supplying a broader organizational tool that could be shared with its conservation partners in the region.

Degradation of water quality is important to the residents and visitors of Tillamook Bay because it has been linked to loss of income due to oyster bed closures, declines in salmonid populations and can result in a decrease of recreational use of the estuary’s resources. Both point and non-point sources of pollution have been targeted for investigation by the Tillamook Bay National Estuary Project (TBNEP), a project designed to bring local stakeholders and citizens together with State and Federal regulators and scientists.

The Sierra Nevada has been an integral part of the heritage of California and has played a profound role in the history of the nation.  However, the extensive and varied resource values of the Sierra Nevada, so essential to the lives and well-being of the citizens of the state, are increasingly threatened by conflicting land management objectives resulting from the checkerboard ownership pattern, expanding residential development, and threat of catastrophic fires that are a product of the private-public land ownership patterns in the north-central Sierra.  In recognition of threats to the rich legacy of the Sierra Nevada, The Trust for Public Land (TPL) is implementing a conservation vision for this landscape—the Sierra Checkerboard Initiative— to produce a more sustainable landscape in the north-central Sierra.  TPL and its partners—the Sierra Forest Legacy (formerly Sierra Nevada Forest Protection Campaign) and the Truckee Donner Land Trust—share a set of common goals and wish to address resource and development issues at a scale not previously undertaken in the region.  These issues include watershed protection, wildlife and wilderness values, recreation and open space, adaptation to climate change, sequestration of greenhouse gases, sustainable timber harvest, and appropriate development.

This report summarizes available scientific information establishing the crucial role that Southern Orange County could play in efforts to conserve biodiversity at both global and regional scales.  The report outlines a conservation framework for the area, using principles of conservation planning to delineate four core biological resource units.  These four resource units must be conserved essentially intact, without further internal fragmentation by development, to continue supporting key species and ecosystem processes.  We present this information in support of the Natural Community Conservation Planning (NCCP) program for the Sotuhern Oregon County NCCP subregion.

Over the past few decades, population growth has mushroomed in Orange County, as in the rest of Southern California, with the development of new communities and the infrastructure to support them.  This growth has come at the expense of natural habitats and species in an area recognized as part of a global hotspot of biodiversity.  The loss of habitat to development created a growing list of threatened and endangered species in Southern California, presenting challenges to federal, state, and local agencies responsible for natural resource protection, as well as to developers and land use planners trying to maintain a healthy economy.  To respond to this dilemma, in 1991 the California legislature passed the Natural Community Conservation Planning (NCCP) Act to encourage a collaborative process for regional planning.  As a result of the NCCP, natural open space reserves have been set aside in the coastal and central portions of Orange County which, when combined with National Forest lands, total approximately 163,000 acres of conserved habitat—majestic peaks, chaparral and oak-studded canyons, rolling scrub- and grassland covered hills, and the remnants of formerly extensive coastal lagoons and estuaries—lands that not only contribute to the preservation of biodiversity, but to the quality of life enjoyed by all Southern Californians.  The legacy of this regional planning process continues, with the goal of protecting a green network of natural lands for wildlife habitat and open space recreation across jurisdictional boundaries in Southern California.