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.
The Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan (DRECP), a major component of California’s renewable energy planning efforts, is designed to provide effective protection and conservation of desert ecosystems while allowing for the appropriate development of renewable energy projects. Approximately 22.5 million acres of federal and non-federal California desert land are in the DRECP Plan Area. The federal portion of plan area was released by the Bureau of Land Management as a Land Use Plan Amendment (LUPA). The project is now transitioning into Phase II, which focuses on county-level planning designed to work in conjunction with the LUPA.
During Phase I of the project, CBI provided science support for this ambitious planning process including a wide range of spatial models and assessments (e.g., species distribution, intactness, conservation value, and climate change). CBI also developed and continues to maintain the DRECP Gateway (launched on September 26, 2014) and various interpretation applications to support the determination of the Final Plan and its implementation. One example of an interpretation application is the DRECP Climate Console, which was designed to allow users to explore climate projections to better understand how climate change could alter ecosystems in the California desert. It provides science-based and actionable climate data to encourage smarter, more comprehensive landscape-level conservation planning efforts and decisions.
During Phase II of the project, CBI is customizing the Gateway to support the adaptive management aspects of the LUPA and to support the county-level planning processes.
To access the gateway, please visit http://drecp.databasin.org/
To access the Climate Console, please visit http://drecp.consbio.webfactional.com/climate
To learn more about the DRECP, please visit www.drecp.org or visit the Data Basin Guide and Case Study about DRECP at http://databasin.org/articles/1408e0eed6754d68a06047aaa0e64c2b
CBI is producing a spatial decision support system (SDSS) for the Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District (“District”). The District works to conserve habitat, watersheds, and agriculture for people and wildlife in Sonoma County, CA, and is pursuing the development of an SDSS to help guide its land conservation strategies. First, the SDSS will support the development of a ten-year, comprehensive county-wide conservation plan through analysis of multiple conservation themes. It will also assist parcel-scale decisions relating to individual conservation easement projects. In addition, it will produce county-wide outputs (e.g., high priority habitat areas) that can be integrated with other open space planning and scenario-building processes (e.g., the County General Plan). Finally, the SDSS framework—its hierarchical data integration architecture—and supporting data will be published online as an interactive, Web-based program so that the public can explore and learn about the District’s prioritization methods and priority conservation areas.
On the technical end, the Sonoma County SDSS will use an expansion of CBI’s Environmental Evaluation Modeling System (EEMS) along with a new habitat representation algorithm and an expansion of the Linkage Mapper connectivity model (from circuitscape.org). Please contact John Gallo with any questions or comments.
The San Joaquin Valley Data Basin Gateway was created to support a multi-stakeholder effort to identify least conflict lands for utility scale solar development in the San Joaquin Valley in Central California. Stakeholders represented include the solar industry, farming community, ranching community, and environmental community. Each stakeholder group addressed the least conflict question from their perspectives and generated map-based results. After compiling the results, around 470,000 acres of land was identified as potentially desirable to solar developers and least conflict from the standpoint of the other groups. Phase I is complete with a final report due out in February 2016, but the Gateway persists with an extremely valuable data library (~600 datasets pertinent to the region) and other content, and stakeholders have expressed interest in continuing to use the system to continue refining the work into the future.
Working closely with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), CBI conducted an assessment of the risk to the bottomland hardwood/wetland forests of the US Southeast to the growing threat from the wood pellet industry largely to fuel power plants throughout the European Union (EU). The final report released by NRDC was entitled, “In the U.S. Southeast, Natural Forests are Being Felled to Send Fuels Overseas“.
This report details the threats facing Southeastern U.S. Forests, which is widely recognized as one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, from the wood pellet industry, which has seen a 150 percent increase in wood pellet exports between 2012-2015. The report explains that 24 million acres of unprotected Southeastern forest lands are at risk and predicts that pellet manufacturing could increase to be twelve times larger than it currently is by 2020. For a one-hour webinar dedicated to this topic, see Bioenergy Threatens Wetland Forests of the US Southeast.
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.
The Santa Barbara County Conservation Blueprint provides a common language and platform for publicly available data to support in depth conversations and informed decisions about the Santa Barbara County landscape. This collaborative project aims to describe the current landscape, natural resources, and community values about land in Santa Barbara County.
CBI is supporting this process for the Santa Barbara County region. The process is led by the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County, Cachuma Resource Conservation District, and the Santa Barbara Foundation’s LEAF Initiative to develop a Conservation Gateway for Santa Barbara County. This process is also guided by a 12-member Steering Committee representing agriculture, conservation, resource management, and the natural sciences.
This data gathering and community engagement process led to a Conservation “Blueprint” (including a Data Basin Gateway) that is providing a science based decision-making platform for future conservation in the county, including acquisition, restoration and guidance for other potential land management opportunities. In the long-term, this process is expected to include collective visioning, tool- sharing and collaborative strategies. The effort will strengthen the region’s integrity by building community, sharing information, and facilitating stewardship.
Visit www.sbcblueprint.net to learn more about the Blueprint project and explore the online Atlas.
The U.S. Forest Service, Oregon State University, and Conservation Biology Institute have collaboratively developed the Seedlot Selection Tool to help forest managers match tree seed collections (called seedlots) with planting sites to help ensure the resilience of forests in a changing climate.
The Seedlot Selection Tool (or SST) is a free web-based decision-support tool that can be used to map planting locations based on either current climate data or a range of possible future climates across the conterminous U.S. and Mexico. Users can select a tree species, a climate scenario and relevant climate variables for the species, and other parameters to identify sources of seedlots appropriate for planting on a particular site or planting sites that are appropriate for planting seedlings from a particular seedlot. A valuable planning and educational tool, the SST helps explore possible future conditions, assess risk, and plan potential responses as part of a decision about which seedlot seedlings will be best adapted to a particular planting site in the future.
Seedlot Selection Tool Guidebook for US Forest Service Region 6 Silviculturists
Seedlot Selection Tool Video Tutorial for US Forest Service Region 6 Silviculturists
The SST was spearheaded by Glenn Howe at Oregon State University and Brad St. Clair at the USFS Pacific Northwest Research Station and developed by Nikolas Stevenson-Molnar, Brendan Ward, and Dominique Bachelet at CBI. Recently the USDA Climate Hub and USFS Region 6 staff worked with CBI to develop a step-by-step Guidebook and Video Tutorial for the Seedlot Selection Tool for Region 6 Silviculturists. These materials are useful to anyone who wants to learn about the use of this resource.
You may access the SST and detailed instructions at https://seedlotselectiontool.org/sst/.
Please see the USDA Climate Hub Seedlot Selection Tool Web Page for more information about the Guidebook and Tutorial Video.
Support for the SST came from the USFS, OSU, CBI, and the USDA Northwest Climate Hub.