Southern California’s montane conifer forests are primarily restricted to the “sky islands” of the San Jacinto, San Bernardino, and San Gabriel Mountains. These unique ecosystems protect the upper watersheds of all of the region’s major rivers and provide ecosystem services critical to both human and ecosystem climate resilience. Managers are in a race to restore resilience to these forests, which are threatened with conversion to hardwood and shrub due to severe wildfires and regeneration failure.
This partnership between the US Forest Service, San Diego State University, and Conservation Biology Institute is applying the latest research on interactions between multiple disturbances specific to this ecoregion to plan effective conservation action.
The effort expands on research from the Connecting Wildlands and Communities project that developed a landscape-scale framework to map refugia from multiple stressors, and ongoing research projects at CBI developing dynamic wildfire and vegetation succession models for understanding the synergistic impacts of climate change, land use change, and different management scenarios.
The team will work with scientists and managers to build interactive spatial models using CBI’s Environmental Evaluation Modeling System (EEMS) with location-specific data to support the collaborative development of a conservation strategy customized to address the threats faced by southern California’s montane forests.
By disrupting wildfire regimes, climate and land use change transform ecosystems, alter carbon budgets, and drive socio-economic impacts in California. We propose to quantify how projected peri-urban growth in the wildland urban interface, climate change, and local management actions influence wildfire activity and downstream effects on vegetation transitions, carbon release, biodiversity, and vulnerable human communities.
We will model wildfire risk as a function of a limited set of stakeholder-guided, realistic future scenarios, using the LANDIS-II simulation model. Past studies have shown the importance of human ignition location and timing on wildfire activity in Southern California, a mechanism we will explore using different land use change scenarios.
We will also model and analyze the potential influence of increasing atmospheric aridity on fire size and severity in forests and compare these effects to adjacent shrubland plant communities.
Taken together, climate, land use, and other environmental variables can lead to fire-driven vegetation type conversion, which can influence carbon sequestration, biodiversity, and even future fire risk to human communities.
Finally, we will explicitly evaluate how different modeled management actions influence wildfire, plant succession, and carbon sequestration. The resulting maps and spatial products will help managers prioritize locations for conservation and management actions. Overlaying maps of vulnerable human communities and biodiversity hotspots with future wildfire change and downstream impacts can better define locations for priority action to facilitate co-benefits to human and natural resources. This research will contribute to scientific publications and be directly relevant to managers, including the Southern California Montane Forests Project.
The San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance (SDZWA) is a world-renowned conservation organization with a 1800-acre zoo, the Safari Park, that houses more than 2600 animal and 3500 plant species. Located in Escondido (northern San Diego County), the Safari Park also includes a 800-acre biodiversity preserve with some of the most well-preserved, California-endemic coastal sage habitat.
In 2007, the Witch fire burned through 600 acres of the biodiversity reserve and stopped just outside the Safari Park borders. Since then, the SDZWA has transformed their in-house wildfire preparedness program, including hiring a team of dedicated wildfire suppression staff, fire suppression equipment boxes scattered throughout the park, an infrared and visible spectrum camera array for early ignition detection, and a 8500-gallon water tank for aerial suppression by local first responders.
While these investments in wildfire readiness are important for protecting the Safari Park grounds, landscape-scale risk analyses are needed to determine where fires may start and spread outside of park boundaries and which additional management activities could mitigate risk from fires originating beyond Park borders. Conservation Biology Institute (CBI) and Dudek have proposed to co-create the needed wildfire risk analysis for the SDZWA Safari Park.
At the core of the risk analysis is a fusion and comparison between two commonly employed modeling efforts used in
CBI is serving as the lead organization in producing a statewide wildlife connectivity ensemble model and associated mapped data in support of a connectivity action plan for the state, which is under development. The modeling will identify priority areas across the state in need of some form of mitigation to promote wildlife connectivity and reduce wildlife/vehicle collisions at the same time. The co-production process includes the close collaboration with an active Technical Advisory Group. All final map products will be made available in Data Basin. The project is being funded by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
The Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition (GSLC) is a collaboration of public and non-governmental organizations committed to the conservation of giant sequoia grove ecosystems. CBI is supporting the GSLC’s Sequoia Grove Protection and Resiliency Project with tools and assistance that will enable GSLC partners and stakeholders to work collaboratively to protect the species from the impacts of drought, beetles, and wildfire made more intense by climate change.
CBI is using its Data Basin platform (databasin.org) to host the Giant Sequoia Data Portal. The portal will be populated with custom maps of the sequoia groves linked to standard metrics and data for assessing grove condition, fuel treatments, and other range-wide information. To inform this giant sequoia management “dashboard” CBI is working with the GSLC to catalog an extensive collection of assessment, monitoring, and remote sensing datasets created by different agencies and projects over many decades of forest management and research. CBI will train and support the GSLC partners in their use of the Giant Sequoia Data Portal for promoting coordinated scientific research, monitoring, long-term species conservation, and continuing to share new data as it becomes available.
In the 1850s, immigrants seeking gold in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains created a connected network of open channels, wooden flumes, and pipes to direct water to their operations and the rapidly-growing foothill towns of Sonora, Columbia, and Jamestown.
170 years later, this historic system is an integral part of the water infrastructure that supports residential, agricultural, hydroelectric, ecosystem, and recreational purposes, providing nearly all of the drinking water to the west slope communities of Tuolumne County. Tuolumne Utilities District (TUD), the agency responsible for managing the 70-plus miles of raw water ditches and potable water infrastructure, is contending with a modern-day concern: the threat of severe wildfire.
Conservation Biology Institute is proud to partner with EN2 Resources, Inc. and the Tuolumne Utilities District (TUD) to develop the TUD Wildfire Defense Plan, a roadmap for addressing wildfire risk to the water system and water treatment facilities.
The TUD Wildfire Defense Plan will have two components: CBI is heading up a Wildfire Risk Mitigation Plan to guide projects that achieve fuels reduction, habitat enhancement, and recreation benefits. EN2 is developing a Wildfire Protection Draft-Points Plan for strategically identifying raw water draft-points along the raw water ditches for fire response and preserving precious potable water.
Together these plans will help TUD manage the system as “green infrastructure”, a vision that addresses the integrated needs of people, the communities, and biodiversity under climate change. TUD, together with Pacific Gas & Electric, the US Forest Service, CALFIRE, Tuolumne County, Tuolumne Fire Safe Council and the Tuolumne Band of Me-Wuk Indians are already working intensively to reduce fuels in the region, and this Plan will assist the agency in obtaining the funding needed to continue this important work.
The TUD Wildfire Defense Plan will be completed by the end of the year. Funding for this project comes from the USDA Forest Service Community Wildfire Defense Grant.
The USDA Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) works with private landowners to advance conservation on their lands. This voluntary program currently comprises over 20 million acres making it an extremely important component of conservation in America. 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 efficiency and effectiveness 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 will be focused on the following tasks:
- Improve mapping and monitoring of forests and grassland as it relates to the CRP using the latest remote sensing technology and processing resources.
- In grassland ecosystems, develop planning and monitoring approaches to help inform and manage for woody vegetation encroachment.
- Conduct spatial analyses to help the program prioritize areas for more targeted enrollment.
- Develop an easy-to-use online application to support the enrollment application process.
- Create an online service to assist landowners in acquiring seed/seedling mixes most appropriate for their circumstances.
- Create an online service that helps manage emergency haying/grazing requests.
- Develop and implement technology and protocols (e.g., phone apps) that will involve landowners more in the implementation of their agreements, which will provide important monitoring to better evaluate program conservation achievements.
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.
The Wildfire Resilience Planner: Strategic Planning at the Landscape Scale
Sonoma Water, Conservation Biology Institute (CBI), Ag Innovations, Pepperwood Preserve, Tukman Geospatial, Digital Mapping Solutions have created the Sonoma County Wildfire Resilience Planner, an online decision support tool for prioritizing locations to reduce wildfire fuels to protect lives and property, community infrastructure, ecosystem services, and biodiversity. The tool encourages collaborative planning of projects on public and private land, helping to leverage individual efforts for a unified and strategic approach to fuels management. The Wildfire Resilience Planner is available for use at https://sonoma.resilienceplanner.org/. For more information or to provide feedback, please contact Molly Oshun, Molly.Oshun@scwa.ca.gov or Deanne DiPietro, deanne.dipietro@consbio.org.
Above: the Sonoma County Wildfire Resilience Planner provides the user with the spatial data and analysis tools to identify high-priority locations for wildland fuels management.
The USFS Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) team, regional partners and CBI developed the Micronesia Challenge Regional Terrestrial Monitoring Initiative tool (mcterrestrialmeasures.org) to allow users to visualize the spatial data from the Micronesia Challenge monitoring effort by regional framework indicator(s) that measure the status of managed conservation areas set aside under the program. Forest data were collected between 2003 and 2018 and are now being used to determine the status and trends in forest area, forest health, understory vegetation, biomass, and carbon storage.
The Micronesia Challenge is a commitment by the Republic of Palau, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, the Federated State of Micronesia, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands to preserve the marine and terrestrial resources that are crucial to the survival of the Pacific traditions, cultures and livelihoods. The overall goal of the Micronesia Challenge is to effectively conserve at least 30% of the near-shore marine resources and 20% of the terrestrial resources across Micronesia by 2020.