This project will produce decision-support maps and tools to support an Interagency Fisher Biology Team in developing and implementing a Conservation Strategy for the west coast fisher Distinct Population Segment (DPS)–a Candidate for listing under that Endangered Species Act that stretches from southern British Columbia through Oregon, Washington, and California.  The Interagency Fisher Team includes representatives of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, US Forest Service, and other Federal, State, and Provincial agencies with an interest in species conservation and forest management.

CBI will prepare maps, analyses, and other decision-support tools, including habitat value, habitat connectivity, and population distribution maps for the DPS under current conditions, and an assessment of climate-change effects on fisher habitat and populations in the future.  These types of spatially explicit decision-support tools are needed to inform conservation planning and adaptive management to sustain and restore habitat value and fisher populations within the fisher DPS.

As the Earth’s climate changes, many plant and animal species are reacting by shifting their geographic ranges. As a result, resource managers are now faced with the challenge of developing and implementing strategies that will support wildlife adaptation to climate change. The sheer magnitude and diversity of models and data that can be applied to climate impact analyses and adaptation strategies can often be confusing to many users.

Recognizing a need for clarity within this field, the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Sciences convened a working group of the nation’s leading conservation biologists, modelers, and policy makers to develop a guidance tool for integrating natural adaptation strategies into the context of natural resource planning and policymaking. The tool, The Yale Mapping Framework (www.databasin.org/yale), assists resource managers in selecting the assessment and modeling strategies that are most relevant to their specific needs, helping to guide choices among the many tools, data, and methods that planners may use to implement their adaptation approaches in the face of a changing climate.

This report assesses potential impacts of feral pig populations in southern California (San Diego, Riverside, Imperial, and Orange counties) and Baja California, with an emphasis on San Diego County. We compiled information on the status of pigs in these areas from the literature and interviews with numerous individuals knowledgeable about feral pig populations, including a population recently introduced into San Diego County. We also reviewed available information on the potential impacts of feral pigs on natural resources, water systems, agriculture, and human health, and discussed the feasibility of various control and eradication options.

We developed population and habitat suitability models for feral pigs in San Diego County to examine the potential for numeric and geographic expansion following the recent introduction near El Capitan Reservoir. The models suggest that the population has the potential to grow rapidly and expand into large expanses of currently unoccupied habitat. Such expansion could harm natural biological resources, including riparian and oak woodland communities and numerous sensitive species. It is possible that populations could establish in such protected lands as Cuyamaca Rancho State Park and Volcan Mountain Preserve, as well as various wilderness areas. This could greatly diminish and possibly nullify large conservation investments already made in this region, including habitat restoration efforts. Finally, an expanding feral pig population in San Diego County could invade and cause grave damage in Baja California, where feral pig populations have not, to date, been reported.

In response to the environmental consequences of burning fossil fuels, particularly climate change, and rising energy prices, alternative energy sources are being actively sought throughout the world. Renewable energy sources can help to meet growing energy demands while reducing environmental costs. One widely promoted alternative is biomass energy derived from dedicated biomass crops, as well as from forest and fire management activities. While biomass energy shows some promise as a clean, renewable, and domestic alternative to fossil fuels, it can conflict with critical ecological values and sustainability goals if not properly planned for and implemented.  In order to move toward ecological sustainability, biomass energy production must not degrade these important ecological values.  However, existing projections of available forest and shrubland biomass resources in the U.S. have not adequately taken these values into consideration.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) commissioned CBI to evaluate the effect that ecological constraints would have on estimates of forest and shrubland biomass resources available for energy production in California, as assessed by the California Energy Commission in 2005.  California, home to many biologically diverse and unique areas, has been a leader in developing biomass as a potential source of energy as the demand for electrical power continues to rise.  The current contribution from biomass to electrical power in California is very small, but current and future biomass resources could be effectively developed to contribute as much as 15 percent of electrical energy demands by 2020. Rapid development of biomass as an energy alternative in California and elsewhere without careful consideration of the overall environmental impact could help achieve climate change abatement goals on the one hand but devastate important biological and ecological values on the other.  Accounting for these effects is an initial step towards reducing the environmental impact and risk to important conservation values as biomass development planning and implementation moves ahead. Using available spatial datasets, CBI’s GIS-based analysis quantified and mapped the changes to the current forest and shrubland biomass estimates after accounting for ecological values, such as old growth forest and critical habitat, and the wildland-urban interface.

CBI has managed a Protected Areas Database (PAD) for the United States since 1999 with public and private support. In May 2010, CBI released PAD-US (CBI Edition) v1.1 a national database of protected fee and easement lands. Since then CBI has been working to redesign PAD-US (CBI Edition) to be a fee lands only database to be used along with the National Conservation Easement Database (NCED) to represent the terrestrial conservation lands of the United States. The most recent relase PAD-US (CBI Edition) Version 2, reflects this change to fee only database along with full updates to thirteen states (including AZ, CA, CO, FL, GA, IL, MI, MT, ND, OR, SD, TN, WA).

Protected areas are the cornerstones around which regional, national and international conservation strategies are developed. Through protected area designations, lands and waters are set-aside in-perpetuity to preserve functioning natural ecosystems, act as refuges for species, and maintain ecological processes. Complementary conservation strategies preserve land for the sustainable use of natural resources, or for the protection of significant geologic and cultural features or open space. PAD-US (CBI Edition) attempts to include all available spatial data on these places. It is our goal to publish the most comprehensive geospatial data set of U.S. protected areas to date.

PAD-US (CBI Edition) provides a rich picture of protected area coverage useful at a variety of scales. It portrays the nation’s protected areas with a standardized spatial geometry and numerous valuable attributes on land ownership, management designations and conservation status (using GAP and IUCN coding systems). It is developed with the purpose of allowing any user – from the general public to professional land managers – to know exactly what lands are protected anywhere the United States and allows them to easily use this inventory for conservation, land management, planning, recreation and other uses. This version should substantially improve our national inventory of protected lands.

Download the national data layer from links below:

– Click here for PAD-US (CBI Edition) Version 2.1 Shapefile (updated September 1, 2016)*

– Click here for PAD-US (CBI Edition) Version 2.1 Geodatabase (updated September 1, 2016)*

*These data have been updated to reflect finalization of reserved status for all protected lands.

The National Conservation Easement Database (NCED) is the first national database of conservation easement information, compiling records from land trusts and public agencies throughout the United States. This public-private partnership brings together national conservation groups, local and regional land trusts, and state and federal agencies around this common objective.

The purpose of the NCED project is to, in collaboration with land trusts and public agencies, create a single, up-to-date, sustainable nationwide system for managing and accessing data about conservation easements. Five leading conservation organizations have joined forces to develop the NCED:

Key partners providing support, advice, and data include the Land Trust Alliance, representing the views and concerns of the nation’s 1,700+ local and regional land trusts, The Nature Conservancy, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, and the U.S. Forest Service.

The fisher (Martes pennanti) is a large member of the weasel family associated with dense, structurally complex, low- to mid-elevation forests. Remaining populations in the western U.S. are small, disconnected from one another, and threatened by habitat modification and fragmentation.  In 2008 fishers occupied less than half their historic range, having apparently been extirpated from the central and northern Sierra Nevada. A small population persist in the southern Sierras, south from Yosemite National Park to the vicinity of the Greenhorn Mountains in southern Tulare County.

The Conservation Biology Institute (CBI) was commissioned by Region 5 of the U.S. Forest Service to compile all available data on fisher populations and habitat in the southern Sierra Nevada, assess their current status, and predict how they are likely to respond to various alternative forest management actions, as well as unmanaged events such as wildfires, drought, or bark beetle outbreaks. The project was designed to create a scientifically credible set of habitat maps and estimates of fisher population size and distribution in the southern Sierra Nevada based on current conditions and likely future change under a range of alternative scenarios.

A group of independent science advisors was assembled to oversee the technical aspects of the analysis and ensure use of best available science.  Stakeholder groups were kept informed via stakeholder representatives from the timber industry, conservation organizations, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, California Department of Fish and Game, and the various National Parks and Forests in the studya are.  CBI worked closely with experts from the Pacific Southwest Reserach Station and Region 5 to ensure that the analysis accurately reflected proposed forest management actions.

The IABIN Data Integration and Analysis Gateway (DIAG) is a gateway within Data Basin that provides a custom view of content in the system for IABIN users.  This gateway is intended to showcase the information produced by the 5 IABIN thematic networks: ecosystems, invasive species, pollinators, protected areas, and species & specimens.

IABIN was created in 1996 as an initiative of the Santa Cruz Summit of the Americas meeting of Heads of State. Steadily gaining momentum, there are now 34 countries in the Americas that have officially been named IABIN focal points.  Although endorsed by governments, NGOs, universities, museums, and the private sector all belong to and play important roles in IABIN.

IABIN will provide the networking information infrastructure (such as standards and protocols) and biodiversity information content required by the countries of the Americas to improve decision-making, particularly for issues at the interface of human development and biodiversity conservation. It is developing an Internet-based platform to give access to scientifically credible biodiversity information currently scattered throughout the world in different institutions, such as government organizations, museums, botanical gardens, universities, and NGOs.

The IABIN Secretariat is dedicated to the implementation of IABIN will support a technical standards development process, coordinate catalogues and directories (either centralized or distributed), manage communications including electronic mailing, lists and Web sites, coordinate efforts with other networks, support training for member countries and organizations, and support the efforts of IABIN nodes.

All content developed by IABIN is open and available for public use.

The World Wildlife Fund has identified over 200 ecoregions (the Global 200) recognized for their high conservation priority, and calls for concentrated conservation planning in these regions. Not surprisingly, forested ecoregions constitute the majority of the Global 200.

Humans associate a wide array of values with forests. Historically, human interaction with forests has been predominantly destructive. Among the most important of these include:

Consequently, long-term forest conservation depends, at least in part, on large-scale forest restoration. The purpose of this report is threefold:

  1. Discuss the concept of forest restoration form a conservation biology perspective
  2. Outline the ecological characteristics, technical constraints, socio-political and economic influences, and overall restoration principles relevant to the Global 200 major habitat types and associated realms
  3. Place forest restoration within the larger context of worldwide forest conservation

The Forest Intactness Database was the result of a collaborative effort between the Conservation Biology Institute, theWorld Wildlife Fund U.S., and the World Resources Institute’sGlobal Forest Watch. Using primarily Landsat TM based National Land Cover Data (NLCD) and 1:100,000 scale USGS road data sets, we assessed relative forest intactness for 39 forested ecoregions of the coterminous United States.

Forest intactness was mapped within “landunits” that were defined by highways and urban areas that contained more than 50,000 people. For each landunit, road density was calculated as well as a suite of class and landscape level fragmentation metrics using FRAGSTATS, a spatial analysis software program. For each landunit, road density, class area, percentage of landscape, total core area index, and mean nearest neighbor results were assigned ordinal scores from which a cumulative score was calculated to create an overall relative forest intactness score. By assigning all landunits with a quantitative measurement of relative forest intactness based on a uniform dataset, this study:

(1) Identified remaining relatively intact forest

(2) Identified landunits that may make good restoration candidates from a regional context

(3) Examined forest fragmentation due to roads which has been omitted from other recent national assessments.