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
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.
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.
*Click here for the full report.
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.
Environmental information is often not widely available, including for the solar distributed generation energy sector. Additionally, environmental, engineering, cost, and electrical distribution grid data are typically disparate. This easy-to-use pilot screening tool developed in collaboration with Black & Veatch and funded by the California Energy Commission (CEC) integrates engineering, cost, and environmental information for planning and decision making specifically in Lancaster, California. The key benefits of such a tool include expedited project planning, reduced permitting and interconnection screening, and clearer stakeholder understanding of developable DG potential. The tool is designed to foster proactive system planning opportunities and an improved sense of regulatory impacts. This pilot screening tool can be viewed here.
Working with Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, Oregon Department of Transportation, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and other governmental and non-governmental partners, CBI is reviewing the current state of knowledge and is developing a wildlife and habitat connectivity blueprint for the State of Oregon, including the plan for generating a number of useful map-based products and online tools that will address planning at multiple scales across the state. This initial phase is expected to conclude in January 2018 with testing of the blueprint being carried out for a subset of the state (Coast Range and Klamath ecoregions) through different funding.