Wildfire in Latin America
If you’ve been following Conservation Biology Institute’s work, you already know that wildfires are essential processes in many ecosystems, playing a fundamental role in sustaining and evolving biodiversity. However, rapid global changes in climate, vegetation, land use, and land management are shifting fire regimes beyond their natural variability ranges. As a consequence, extreme wildfires are becoming increasingly frequent and severe, causing large-scale human, economic, and ecological losses. In recent years, the planet has witnessed disastrous fires that have significantly altered natural fire regimes impacting many species, destroyed thousands of human-built structures, displaced entire human communities, and caused severe impacts on human health due to persistent and widespread smoke.
In Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), uncontrolled fires have transformed landscapes, significantly affecting societies, economies, and the environment. The alteration of fire regimes is leading to profound ecological transformations, particularly in the tropical areas of the continent, posing serious threats to biodiversity and driving species extinction. Wildfires are also altering essential ecosystem services on which humans depend, such as clean air and water supply, soil stability and fertility, climate regulation, numerous cultural services, and more. While climate change is driving the frequency and severity of wildfires, wildfires themselves impact climate change by releasing significant amounts of greenhouse gases and causing the reduction of previously stable carbon sinks.
While LAC may seem far away to many of us that live in the northern hemisphere, the impacts of these wildfires are far-reaching. For example, the Amazon is a critical part of the health of the entire planet. Here are just a few ways that the health of the Amazon forests are critical across the globe:
- It is one of the planet’s largest carbon sinks, storing 150B metric tons of carbon, equivalent to 10 years worth of global fossil fuel emissions. Even if the world reduced human-caused emissions enough to get on track to fulfill the Paris Climate Agreement, keeping global warming below a 1.5-degree-C increase from pre-industrial levels, loss of just 20-25% of the Amazon and its stored carbon would put that target out of reach.
- Crops across the planet are dependent on the power of the Amazon’s hydrologic cycle – the forest releases 20B tons of water into the atmosphere each day. Without this, droughts are likely to become significantly more severe in agricultural areas across the globe.
- If you or someone you love has had cancer, they’ve likely been treated with medications that are derived from the Amazon. Of the plants deemed to be useful in the treatment of cancer, 70% only grow in tropical rainforests.
- Those with heart disease in your life are likely taking an ACE Inhibitor medication. This particular medication’s ingredients are derived from a viper species that is native to the Amazon.
- If you like pineapple, chocolate, sweet potatoes and coffee, odds are that what you’re eating is from tropical regions of Latin America.
Despite these challenges, LAC’s technical and financial capacity to address wildfires is limited. There is an urgent need to strengthen governmental agencies, fire brigades, and local communities with effective prevention, management, and recovery tools and strategies. Interdisciplinary research is required to understand and address the geographically varying causes and consequences of fires, as well as to develop regional systems for collecting and analyzing data to support evidence-based decision-making.
Conservation Biology Institute has partnered with the Academia Nacional de Bomberos de Colombia (Colombian National Firefighting Academy), to establish the Centro de Conservación Biológica de Operaciones Forestales (CCBOF- Latin American Center for Biological Conservation and Forest Operations) in Cali, Colombia. The center will develop novel wildfire research, consolidate existing scientific knowledge and data, educate community members on wildfire risk reduction and response, as well as train firefighters in the latest wildfire management approaches. When it is established, CCBOF will be the only resource of its kind in all of LAC.
While we believe we will be able to secure large financial sponsorship from international development banks and foundations, the effort to obtain this financing takes time and resources. CBI has almost never asked for donation dollars in the past, but this effort is so crucial to the health of the planet, and action must be taken swiftly, so- we are asking you for your help. Any amount you can give will get us one step closer to helping LAC build wildfire resiliency for their forests, communities and biodiversity. Thank you in advance for your generosity!
CBI at COP16
A Reflection From Our Executive Director
CBI’s Robin Jones- Executive Director, Dr. Alexandra Syphard- Senior Research Scientist, and Karl Peet- Senior Advisor, Global Strategy, spent the past two weeks participating in the 16th Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (COP16) in Cali, Colombia. The country of Colombia and the city of Cali did an extraordinary job of hosting an estimated (and unprecedented) 16,000 participants – the beauty of the region and the hospitality of the people were on full display.
To put COP16 in a broader context, just prior to the kickoff of the conference, World Wildlife Fund released its Living Planet Report with dismaying news that over 70% of wildlife on the planet has been lost, with more than 95% loss in the Latin American and Caribbean region. The urgency of all attendees in finding and implementing creative solutions was palpable throughout the event.
While in Cali, CBI co-hosted three well-attended panel discussion events, composed of international practitioners with deep experience in various fields. While the amount of material covered in each discussion was vast, the following paragraphs highlight some insightful elements from each event.
In our event, co-hosted with Despacio, SabidurAI, and World Resources Institute, entitled, “Leveraging Traditional Knowledge and Modern Technology to Reduce Tropical Deforestation, ‘Ghost Road’ Expansion, and Habitat Fragmentation”, we explored the complexity of issues associated with the buildout of linear infrastructure and its costs and benefits to both humans and biodiversity. We saw an impressive demonstration of advances in remote sensing and artificial intelligence that can provide a far more accurate representation of new road expansion than has been available to scientists and ecologists in the past, and showed just how quickly road expansion is happening in places such as the Congo Basin. Projeto Reconecta and the Smithsonian National Zoo/Conservation Biology Institute gave us a sneak peek at recent research on the efficacy in man-made crossing bridges in reducing the incidence of fauna death due to vehicle collisions.
Participants heard two distinctly different perspectives on road expansion, one from Association of Saamaka Traditional Authorities in Suriname, and one from Indigenous-owned Native Root Coffee in Colombia. The Saamaka people have historically settled along and navigated exclusively by river, and road incursion has been a largely negative development, damaging and leading to deforestation of large swaths of their sacred lands. Native Root, on the other hand, recognizes the negative impact that linear infrastructure buildout has on their ecosystem, but they are also dependent upon these roads in order to get their product to market. The discussion that ensued among our panelists and the audience was vibrant and complex.
Next up was a panel discussion entitled “Global Challenges to Sustaining Biodiversity in an Era of Changing Fire Regimes”, co-hosted with CREAF, in which our panelists highlighted the rapid changes in wildfire patterns across the globe from historic fire regimes, and the impact on biodiversity as a result. CBI’s Dr. Alexandra Syphard set the stage by contrasting two distinct ecosystems: montane forests that are adapted for and dependent on relatively frequent fire on the landscape, and mediterranean chaparral which has historically experienced relatively infrequent fire. In both instances, the frequency of these fires has changed dramatically in the past two decades, leading to dramatically negative impacts on biodiversity, as well as significant risk to human health, safety and infrastructure.
Reflecting back to our earlier session on linear infrastructure expansion, one of the presenters showcased the close relationship between roads and wildfire in Chile, showing that 90% of fires occur within one kilometer of a road. We heard evidence that showcased that the world is on the precipice of tipping into a very vicious cycle in which climate change is not only driving massive changes in fire frequency, size and intensity, but it is also becoming a driver of climate change as a very significant emitter of CO2 and destroyer of carbon biomass reserves.
The local fire agency, Bomberos Voluntarios de Santiago de Cali, provided the firefighter perspective, highlighting how the forests surrounding Cali are burning, often times for the first time, highlighting the need for fire departments across Colombia and all of the LAC region to develop new operational capacity to prevent and fight these fires, often in the absence of scientific research that can guide their management activities. As we left this event, all panelists saw the value of cooperation between academia, fire management agencies, community leadership, policymakers and industry in developing and adopting science-based approaches to best build resiliency for both communities and nature.
Finally, we ended our events in Cali with a highly informative panel discussion on “Protecting Biodiversity & Advancing Renewables Through Energy-Water-Food Synergies”, co-hosted by REN21 and Fundación Bariloche. The Former Secretaria Nacional de Energía de Panamá 2023-2024 kicked things off by providing detailed statistics on the projected minerals and water required to achieve global net zero 2050 targets through renewable energy infrastructure development. This starkly highlighted how regions with critical energy transition minerals (Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America and the Caribbean) will experience significant additional pressure on their biodiversity as a result of this transition. This illustrates just how important the implementation of multi-benefit infrastructure such as agrivoltaics, recycling of scarce minerals and most importantly, reduction of energy consumption will be in achieving these goals without dramatic impacts on global biodiversity.
Panelists discussed the importance of predictive models and aligned incentive programs in achieving carbon neutrality while also increasing the area of healthy habitat in support of biodiversity. We were reminded that while many parts of the world have much to benefit from shifting from fossil fuel to renewable energy generation, grassroots advocacy and education are critical to creating a groundswell of public pressure that pushes policy and investment in that direction.
The CBI team wrapped up COP16 feeling optimistic about the capacity of the attending organizations and parties to collaborate toward aligning and implementing innovative, large-scale, effective policies, incentives and programs to achieve meaningful progress toward the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and Paris Agreement targets. We left with new relationships with partner organizations that complement CBI’s capabilities, and we look forward to showcasing future collaborative work that results from our collective investment of time and resources at COP16.
Advancing Private Land Conservation
The USDA Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) financially and technically aids farmers and ranchers across the country in dedicating portions of their land holdings to support conservation over a period of time. We have been working closely with the USDA in developing online tools to improve the efficacy and effectiveness of the CRP in several pilot states: Washington, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Colorado. Now open to the public, a beta version of the online application is ready for testing and review!
For any location in one of our pilot States, simply drop a pin on the map and generate a list of plants that can be grown in that location. The generated list can be filtered based on various criteria such as (1) growth form, (2) soil characteristics, (3) plant tolerances, and (4) wildlife preference – to name a few. The results can then be transferred to a Vendor Match Module in one easy step, showing users where they can purchase the seeds and seedlings of the selected plant(s). Vendors can create private accounts where they can describe their business, provide and routinely update their plant species inventories, and more. CBI presented the tool at the recent conference of the American Seed Trade Association, one of the oldest trade organizations with over 650 members. Conference attendees who stopped by our exhibit provided valuable feedback and expressed excitement as the application gets rolled out for the entire country.
Our next steps are to make improvements to this application based on feedback from reviews, and expand coverage to include additional states in the months ahead, with the goal of covering the entire country.
This spooky season we wanted to share some one-of-a-kind bat calls that one of our Ecologists, Dr. Chris Cosma, recorded between July and September of 2024 in Douglas County, Eastern Washington. Since the bat calls are ultrasonic (above the frequency of human hearing) the recordings are slowed down to about 1/10 speed. This lowers the frequency to be audible to humans. Check it out!
Bat calls in the video:
- Townsend’s big-eared bat (Corynorhinus townsendi)
A candidate species in Washington state, with two endangered subspecies elsewhere inthe US. This call was detected on August 30, in a site surrounded by predominantly restored CRP land. Towsend’s bat is a moth specialist – insect decline due to pesticide use and other stressors poses a major threat to the species. - The Spotted Bat (Euderma maculatum)
Also a moth specialist, the only species in its genus, and has the largest ears of any bat species in North America. It is one of the few bat species that uses echolocation frequencies low enough to be audible to humans. - The big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus)
A relatively large species, predominantly feeding on beetles and major agricultural pests. This bat is relatively resistant to white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease that has been decimating other bat species in the US. - The little brown bat (Mytotis lucifugus)
Once one of the most common bats across much of the US, but has experienced severe declines in recent decades, especially in the Northeastern U.S., due to white-nose syndrome. This deadly fungal disease has led to this species’ listing as endangered by the IUCN. Despite these declines, the species remains relatively common in parts of its range, including Washington state, where white-nose syndrome has not yet had as devastating an impact.
Translating Science to Action in Southern California’s Montane Forests
A new partnership between the US Forest Service, San Diego State University, and Conservation Biology Institute is applying newly emerging science to protect southern California’s montane conifer forests from the impacts of climate change and severe wildfires.
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 led by Drs. Alexandra Syphard and Erin Conlisk at CBI developing dynamic wildfire and vegetation succession models for forecasting the synergistic impacts of climate change, land use change, and different management scenarios. CBI’s Environmental Evaluation Modeling System (EEMS) will support collaborative development of interactive, locally relevant models for identifying priority locations for management actions.
COP 16 is Coming Up!
For the first time, CBI will be attending the 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP16), scheduled from 21 October to 1 November 2024 in Cali, Colombia. Our delegation has been granted status to observe negotiations and will be leading three international panels during the meeting on the topics of wildfire, renewable energy planning, and habitat connectivity and transportation. In addition, we will be hosting our inaugural Wildfire Academy workshop while at COP16.
Our delegation consists of Robin Jones- Executive Director, Dr. Alexandra Syphard- Senior Global Change Research Scientist, and Karl Peet- Senior Advisor on Global Strategy. If you will be attending COP16, we would love to meet with you there. Drop us a note at info@consbio.org and we will be sure to make it happen.
We will be making regular posts to our social media accounts (Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, X) while we are at COP16, so be sure to follow us on your platform of choice to see our updates!
California Site Check Update
In order to streamline the construction of much-needed new housing in California, the Legislature created multiple California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) statutory exemptions for housing projects. Working closely with the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research (OPR) in coordination with the Department of Housing and Community Development, CBI developed the Site Check online application for California to help speed up much-needed housing in the state while protecting sensitive lands and reducing greenhouse gas emissions via transportation.
Site Check underwent an important update recently that is now available to all interested users at no charge. The easy-to-use tool was not designed to definitively determine whether or not a particular parcel is exempt from CEQA, but it is proving to be a convenient and powerful first step in determining how CEQA may apply to any potential housing development in the state reducing planning time and costs.
Outdoor Recreation is Not Benign
Public interest in outdoor recreation is high and growing worldwide with over 8 billion visits per year to the world’s terrestrial designated protected areas. In the U.S., 2023 showed the highest number of outdoor recreation participants on record (175.8 million), which was 55 percent of the nation’s population greater than age six.
In 2022, outdoor recreation in the U.S. generated $1.1 trillion in economic output and added $564 billion to the nation’s GDP, or 2.2% (Headwaters Economics 2023). This is larger than many other high-profile sectors such as oil and gas development, motor vehicle transportation, and the air transportation industry. Not only has outdoor recreation become a very big business, but it also provides many other important benefits. Outdoor recreation has become so important that it is a common driver in many government conservation strategies.
However, a growing body of evidence is showing another side of outdoor recreation where negative impacts are being witnessed to the very nature visitors wish to enjoy. Some have even postulated that we are “loving the land to death.” Ecological degradation has been reported in the form of soil and water pollution, vegetation destruction and alteration (including invasive species propagation), and behavior modification, stress, and death of numerous wildlife species. In a major review paper, species richness and abundance have been reported to be lower in association with higher levels of recreation across many species of vertebrates (Larson et al. 2019). In addition, numerous tribes in the western U.S. have expressed growing concern over the loss and degradation of their traditional rights that are increasingly becoming compromised by expanding outdoor recreation.
CBI will be working closely with tribes in Washington over the next year to help develop a map-based analytical approach for accessing environmental and social risks (particularly from the perspective of tribal rights on public lands) from current and planned outdoor recreation on state lands and to help forge a pathway that will result in adequate recreational opportunities while minimizing the associated negative impacts.
New Publications
The Importance of Geography in Forecasting Future Fire Patterns Under Climate Change
Syphard, A.D., S.J.E. Velazco, M.B. Rose, J. Franklin, and H.M. Regan
Models and maps anticipating how fire patterns may change in response to climate change and other drivers are important tools for climate-resilient protection of ecosystems and human communities. When using these models for decision-making, however, it is critical to understand their sources of uncertainty. We show that different geographical extents of model boundaries can result in nearly opposite future fire predictions for the same geographical areas—illustrating geographical variation in both fire regimes and their predictability. There is no one-size-fits-all prediction for fire futures in California or a single strategy to mitigate fire risk to people, infrastructure, and ecosystem resilience. Modeling and decision-making may be most reliable if constrained to the geographical limits of specific fire regimes.
Climate and Weather Drivers in Southern California Santa Ana Wind and non-Santa Wind Fires
Keeley, J.E., M. Flannigan, T.J. Brown, T. Rolinski, D. Cayan, A.D. Syphard, J. Guzman-Morales, and A. Gershunov
Autumn and winter Santa Ana Winds (SAW) are responsible for the largest and most destructive wildfires in southern California. This study analyzed available data to determine climate and weather factors responsible for the largest wildfires. The drivers of fire size differ between non-SAW and SAW fires. The best predictor of fire size for non-SAW fires was drought during the prior 5 years, followed by a current year vapor pressure deficit. For SAW fires, wind speed followed by drought was most important.
Conserving the Endangered Pacific Fisher in the Southern Sierra Nevada
In 2016, CBI published a comprehensive Conservation Assessment and Strategy for the Southern Sierra Nevada population of Pacific fisher with input from a wide array of fisher researchers and forest ecologists. At the time, this was considered by state and federal agencies to be the best available science to guide fisher conservation efforts. Unfortunately, the release of the Strategy coincided with a dramatic shift in landscape conditions across the Sierra Nevada and especially in the dense coniferous forests used by fishers. Historic drought from 2012 to 2015 was the most severe in over 1200 years, resulting in the deaths of at least 129 million conifer trees in the region, which in turn have fueled large, severe wildfires that have been burning across large swaths of habitat for fisher and other forest-dependent species. What was once a relatively connected chain of mixed-conifer forest along the western slope of the Sierra Nevada has become a series of isolated and degraded patches.
Fishers are strongly associated with older, dense forest having an abundance of large trees, logs, snags, and other forest debris. They den and raise kits almost exclusively in tree cavities, typically in large, live conifers and oaks. Fierce predators able to move freely through the forest canopy, fishers eat a wide variety of mammals, birds, and reptiles as well as berries and mushrooms. They present a conservation dilemma though; the dense, structurally complex forest conditions they prefer also provide abundant fuel for wildfires, which are increasing in scope and severity. The key to fisher conservation therefore lies in the thoughtful restoration of natural ecological processes, such as mixed-severity fire, which once created a dynamic mosaic of heterogenous forest conditions as fires thinned and sometimes destroyed fisher habitat in the short term, while sustaining the patchy mosaic of diverse forest conditions they needed in the long term.
In 2020, the Southern Sierra Nevada distinct population of fisher was listed as federally endangered, and last month, CBI finalized an agreement with the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to update the 2016 Conservation Strategy. Led by Dr. Wayne Spencer, the updated Strategy will summarize all available science on SSN fisher ecology and population dynamics, and provide recommendations for the conservation of fisher and their habitat in this new landscape. It will be structured to align with the US Fish and Wildlife recovery planning process under the Endangered Species Act, while also serving as a model for a new form of conservation plan that recognizes the importance of habitat resilience and landscape dynamics.
For more information on fishers and CBI’s efforts over the years to support their conservation, check out CBI’s Southern Sierra Nevada Fisher Conservation webpage.
Reintroducing a Tiny Endangered Species to Its Former Range
The critically endangered Pacific pocket mouse (Perognathus longimembris pacificus), once thought extinct, is being reintroduced to native habitat areas on the southern California coast by the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance (Endangered Pacific pocket mice reintroduced at Camp Pendleton). CBI’s Chief Scientist Emeritus, Dr. Wayne Spencer, discovered one of the three remaining wild populations in 1995 and led recovery research on the species for a number of years (Spencer 2005). He currently serves on the team led by the Wildlife Alliance to identify sites where this tiniest subspecies of the little pocket mouse can be released back into the wild from a captive colony at the San Diego Safari Park (Chock et al. 2022). Most of the fine sandy habitats the Pacific pocket mouse requires, originally distributed from the current location of the Los Angeles Airport to the Mexican border, have been paved over or severely altered by human activities, leaving few opportunities to restore populations. CBI is proud to contribute to recovery of this critically endangered little rodent in a human-dominated ecosystem.
New Publication: “New research illuminates the ecological importance of gray wolves in the American West”
A recent publication in the journal Bioscience illustrates the importance of top predators in shaping natural ecosystems (in this case, gray wolves in the western U.S.). Led by William Ripple, a scientist at Oregon State University and CBI Associate, the research explores how the loss of gray wolves in the West impacts plant and animal communities and the overall function of the ecosystem.
By the 1930s, gray wolves were removed from most of the Western U.S. and its national parks. Examining three national parks (Yellowstone, Olympic, and Wind Cave), the authors of this publication clearly demonstrate that the significant increase in ungulate populations correlates with the declines in deciduous trees that occurred following the removal of these animals.
The paper also calls attention to “shifting baselines” wherein increasingly degraded conditions are often viewed as reflecting the historical state of the system. The authors write, “Studying an altered ecosystem without recognizing how or why the system has changed over time because of the absence of a large predator could have serious implications for wildlife management, biodiversity conservation, and ecosystem restoration, like diagnosing a sick patient without a baseline health exam.”
It is clear that the loss of top predators has major consequences for the health of natural ecosystems; however, as the authors remind us, there are likely other factors such as fire suppression, invasive species, and overgrazing that we need to examine closely. By acknowledging the historical presence of large predators, other anthropogenic legacies, and their potential ecosystem effects, researchers can contribute to more effective conservation and management strategies in national parks and beyond.
New Publication: “Sustainable nature-based solutions require establishment and maintenance of keystone plant-pollinator interactions”
CBI’s ecologist, Chris Cosma, co-authored a recent publication that focuses on ecosystem regulators on the opposite end of the animal food chain – insects.
As global climate change continues to threaten biodiversity and the provision of ecosystem services, nature-based solutions (NBS) seek to integrate societal and ecological aspects of environmental problems, thereby benefiting humans while minimizing ecosystem degradation. Despite the recognition that ecosystem services rely on biodiversity conservation, NBS generally has not given sufficient attention to the biodiversity component, especially as it pertains to insects. Although NBS encompasses ecosystems of all types, at their core, many NBS depend upon plants that, in turn, depend upon pollinators.
Unfortunately, populations of many insect pollinators such as bees, butterflies, and moths have plummeted in recent decades. These declines highlight the interconnected nature of plant and pollinator conservation. The reproduction of almost 90% of angiosperms and 70% of the main human food crops are tied to the animals that pollinate them. Thus, the global change-driven loss of pollinators represents both the loss of biodiversity and the loss of a critical ecosystem service. The sustained success of NBS therefore depends upon preserving resilient pollinator communities, which can be accomplished by prioritizing keystone species and interactions that maintain function under future climates.
New Publication: “Evidence of increasing wildfire damage with decreasing property price in Southern California fires”
Alexandra Syphard and Erin Conlisk of CBI’s Conservation Planning & Management Team helped examine the disproportionate socio-economic impact of wildfires in Southern California. Using the Zillow Transaction and Assessment Database (ZTRAX), spatial analysis of wildfire severity, home destruction, and property value was examined within fire perimeters occurring from 2000–2019.
The authors found evidence to support the hypothesis that lower-priced properties were more likely to be damaged, however, the likelihood of damage and the influence of property value significantly varied across individual fire perimeters. When considering individual fires, properties within two 2003 fires (Cedar and Grand Prix – Old Fires) showed statistically significant decreasing burn damage with increasing property value. Occurring in 2007 and later, three fires (Witch-Poomacha, Thomas, and Woolsey) showed no significant relationship between price and damage.
Further exploration into this topic is needed. In the meantime, decision-makers should consider allocating wildfire risk mitigation resources such as fire-fighting and wildfire structural preparedness resources to more socioeconomically vulnerable neighborhoods in Southern California.
The Wildfire Academy
In the past several years, CBI has developed a reputation for expertise in the applied science of wildfire prevention, management, and recovery. Our team of experts is constantly in demand, and we have come to recognize that our team’s knowledge and approach have the opportunity to scale its impact through education. As such, CBI has embarked upon the creation of The Wildfire Academy, an educational program that addresses the impact of wildfire grounded in the best available science and accessible to all. The program is being designed to educate landowners, students, policymakers, and other decision-makers on this important topic as we continue to live in a rapidly changing world.
We are actively seeking sponsors for the program, if interested, or for any other inquiries, please email us at marketing@consbio.org.
Placer County Conservation Planning Support
Placer County, California continues to be one of the fastest-growing counties in the state. Beginning in 1994, the county General Plan aimed to accommodate this growth while conserving productive agricultural lands and protecting many of its natural communities and rare species. After numerous assessments and stakeholder engagements, a draft Placer County Conservation Plan (PCCP) was released in 2011.
For the western foothills portion of the county, the PCCP focuses on protecting or restoring various oak woodland communities as well as habitat for identified aquatic and terrestrial covered species including, valley elderberry longhorn beetle, Central Valley Chinook salmon, Central Valley steelhead, California red-legged frog, northwestern pond turtle, California black rail, and Swainson’s hawk. Implementing the plan is underway and involves integrating high-value lands made available by willing sellers. The biggest challenge is finding suitable habitat to mitigate the projected impacts of new growth in a way that maintains landscape ecological integrity.
CBI was asked by the Foothills Conservation Strategy Ad Hoc Committee to integrate the available spatial data pertaining to the natural community and species targets listed in the plan and create a flexible spatially explicit model to assist county staff in identifying and systematically evaluating potential lands for protection or restoration to meet plan goals. The model housed in Data Basin contains some private data; therefore, it is available only to county staff.
Map of the PCCP focal areas for the valley and foothills subareas. The parcel-based model created and housed in Data Basin is for the foothills region.
“CBI has made a significant contribution to the Plan implementation through the development of an on-l ine tool in Data Basin that supports the development and implementation of conservation strategies for the Sierra Nevada Foothills. Placer County staff and the PCA advisory committee are using this tool for preliminary identification of critical parcels that will be followed up with parcel-level field analysis.”
Dennis Grossman, Foothill Representative, Placer County Conservation Program Advisory Committee
New CBI Team Members!
Jorge Diaz (far left) started his career in technology as an artist, animator, and designer working on both the mainstream and the educational video game industry. After completing an MS in Computer Science he started as a software engineer in the public sector. Sometime in between he taught college classes in storyboarding as well as computer science and co-owned two art supply stores with his wife. His developer experience is in accessibility, automation, full stack development, security, user interface design, and developing systems for a wide variety of user types.
Libbey White (center left) grew up enjoying the natural splendor of Montana, which instilled in her an instinctive interest in conservation. Libbey majored in biology, but was a laundromat attendant, book store clerk, ranch cook, and lab assistant, among other things, before getting close to working with data and code. She got her start in the software field thanks to willing tutors at the Center for Computational Biology at Montana State University. Since then she has held a variety of software development roles, including exhibit software developer at Oregon Museum of Science & Industry and research software developer at Knight Cancer Institute, where she created a genomic data visualization application.
Kerrie Ishkarin (center right) has a Bachelor of Fine Art and a Certificate in UX Design from Rhode Island School of Design and joined the CBI Software & Tool Team, bringing 8+ years of experience working as a user interface (UI), user experience (UX), and product designer. She has worked on desktop and mobile product designs using tools such as Figma, Sketch, and InVision to create sketches, wireframes, prototypes, and implementation-ready designs.
Karl Peet (far right) is a researcher and advocate working at the intersection of climate change, energy transition, and conservation. He is helping to shape CBI’s global engagement strategy on nature-positive infrastructure and renewable energy. Karl is also assessing strategies to meet 2030 targets of the Global Biodiversity Framework and other multilateral environmental agreements, reflecting the technical knowledge and cultural imperatives of Indigenous communities.
Data Basin Now Supports ArcGIS Pro Data Formats!
Data Basin now supports the latest Esri software file formats generated by ArcGIS Pro.
Roads Drive Tropical Forest Biodiversity Loss
There are around 40 million miles of roads in the world with another 15.5 million miles projected to be added by 2050, which is the fastest expansion rate of road building in history. Roads continue to be constructed around the world including the U.S., which leads the world in the number of linear miles (>7 million miles), but the most recent concentration of new road building is in the tropical nations. Even more troubling is that many roads are being constructed informally or illegally and, therefore, do not appear on any map. These are sometimes referred to as “ghost roads”.
In a recent article in Nature, the authors conducted a study on roads in the Asia-Pacific region and found 3.0 to 6.6 times more roads exist than are shown in any leading roads dataset. These ghost roads are being built to gain access to pristine tropical forest areas for various purposes: agriculture expansion, logging, mining, poaching, and land speculators – all with serious ecological consequences. Roads were shown to be the strongest correlate to deforestation out of 38 potential variables. The authors conclude that “ghost roads are among the gravest of all direct threats to tropical forests.”
Unfortunately, the Asia-Pacific Region is not alone. The same issue has been recorded in many other parts of the world (e.g., the Amazon region and Congo Basin).
Of course, roads are a vital infrastructure for modern societies, so where should they go? An article by Distinguished Research Professor Bill Laurance, published in The Conversation, describes a global strategy for road building. Bill and his coauthors intersected areas of relative environmental value with areas of relative agricultural potential identifying priority areas for both and where in the world these two uses are in conflict.
Improving road networks in areas of high agricultural potential and low environmental value are good candidates as they have immediate value to local people. In the high environmental value areas, especially in direct conflict with potential new agricultural land, it would be wise to avoid the first cut into these areas as once there is an initial access road constructed many more roads rapidly follow with serious consequences to the local biodiversity. For example, in the Congo region of Africa, 60 percent of the forest elephant population has been lost over the last decade and the critically endangered eastern lowland gorilla (Grauer’s Gorilla) population is estimated to be 6,800 individuals.
New Publication: Chile’s Valparaíso hills on fire
Our Senior Research Scientist, Alexandra Syphard, is a co-author of the paper in Science, Chile’s Valparaíso hills on fire, which highlights human-caused ignitions, flammable plantations, and prolonged droughts making Chile one of the most fire-prone places in the world. A record-breaking Chile wildfire in February destroyed thousands of homes, caused 133 human fatalities, and burned thousands of hectares of stressed vegetation. Wildfire mitigation in Chile will require many steps, including (1) governance and land-use planning, (2) restoring and managing native forest vegetation, (3) removing highly flammable forest plantations, (4) prohibiting the conversion of recently burned native forests into exotic forest plantations or new urban developments, and (5) strengthening fire prevention programs in Chile helping reduce human-caused ignitions.
The Little Things That Run the World
In 1987, in a brand new journal called Conservation Biology, the pioneering entomologist E.O. Wilson published a short article titled “The Little Things That Run the World (The Importance and Conservation of Invertebrates)”. In it, Wilson painted a chilling picture of what the world might look like without insects. As the most diverse group of animals on the planet, insects account for around 80% of all known species. They form the foundation for all other life, performing many critical ecosystem functions including pollination, soil maintenance, nutrient cycling, pest control, and as a food source for numerous animals. Their importance to humans cannot be overstated: as just one example, one out of every three bites of food we eat is provided by pollinating insects. Thus, without insects, humankind—along with most of life on Earth—would soon vanish.
Now, almost 40 years later, we risk seeing Wilson’s hypothetical insect-less future become reality. As scientists continue to learn about the essential roles insects play, entire species are being lost (5% to 10% over the last 150 years) and over 40% of insect species have declined over the last decade. Since Wilson wrote his now-famous article, global insect populations have declined by around one-third. There are many contributing factors: pesticides, pollution, climate change, invasive species, and above all, loss of native habitat. While they get less attention than mammals or birds, the ongoing loss of insects is an existential threat that requires urgent attention.
CBI has worked on a limited number of insect conservation projects. However, given the growing crisis, we feel it is important to increase our focus on this critical issue. Towards this goal, we are thrilled to announce the addition of Dr. Chris Cosma to our team, who brings with him fresh approaches to insect conservation (see below). For example, given their immense diversity and variable responses to environmental change, the species-by-species approach to conservation, which is a common strategy for larger organisms, may not be suitable for insects. Instead, adopting a community-level focus, and integrating tools such as ecological network analysis and spatial analyses, offers great hope for protecting and restoring the world’s insects. Additionally, unlike many larger organisms which rely heavily on large protected areas, the battle to save insects will be won by restoring small, stepping-stone habitats to increase connectivity across human-dominated landscapes. This includes the largely untapped resources of marginal lands in agricultural and urban areas (including hedgerows, private yards and gardens, and road medians). It is in part the little things that we can do—such as converting lawns to native plants and advocating for wildflower plantings along highways—that will help save the little things that run the world.
Welcome Dr. Chris Cosma
CBI welcomes Chris Cosma to CBI! Chris recently earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside where he specialized in Lepidopteran Conservation Biology. Chris received numerous grants and awards while at the university. Most recently, he serves as Co-lead of a working group funded by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) tasked to improve our practical knowledge of plant-insect relationships to advance pollinator conservation. Chris brings considerable knowledge and energy to protecting and restoring insect populations, especially moths and butterflies, and will initially be working on improving the conservation effectiveness of private lands enrolled in the USDA Conservation Reserve Program.
Earth Day 2024
I remember the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. I was in 8th grade anticipating the move to the high school in the fall. But on that Wednesday afternoon, I still remember heading out with my garbage bag and my collecting stick (nail at the end of an old broom handle) and going about the school grounds picking up paper and plastic waste. It was not viewed as a big deal by the school – I was out alone that day, but it meant a lot to me to honor the first Earth Day in some way. This year, the theme is ‘Planet vs Plastics’. Plastics in the environment have grown over the last 54 years – we have a plastics problem. Most have heard about the Pacific Garbage Patch, which is actually two patches – one off the coast of California and one off the coast of Japan. According to NOAA Marine Debris Program, it would take an estimated 67 ships one year to clean up less than 1 percent of the North Pacific. Closer to home – our bodies – there is growing alarm about nanoplastics finding their way into our bloodstream. Researchers at the National Institutes of Health reported that, on average, a liter of bottled water included 240,000 tiny pieces of plastic. Little did I know that the plastic I was picking up with my stick back in 1970 would turn out to be a much bigger problem.
First Data Basin Newsletter Comes Out This Month!
As you may recall from our March edition, we have a new monthly newsletter coming out for our sister website this month! With over 50,000 users, we are very excited to have a new way of keeping people up-to-date with user experiences, high-resolution mapping, and tips on how to best utilize our rapidly growing initiative, Data Basin!
More Monthly Newsletters
World Rewilding Day
March 20th is World Rewilding Day! Started in 2021 by the Global Rewilding Alliance, this day was created to raise awareness about this progressive approach to conservation. Enabling natural processes to shape and repair ecosystems, this type of ecological restoration aims to maximize biodiversity and reduce human impacts on the environment. Cost-effective and practical over small to large extents, rewilding projects aim to protect, restore, regenerate, and nurture the natural world for fresh air, clean water, and landscapes that thrive full of life of all kinds. More than anything, rewilding is a social movement participated in by people from all over the world working to restore areas to make them wild again. Join the movement!
Connectivity Map for the State of Washington
With our considerable experience in wildlife connectivity and spatial modeling, CBI was chosen by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife to help produce a comprehensive connectivity map for wildlife in the state of Washington. Working closely with the project core team and a talented Technical Advisory Group comprised of various experts, CBI is providing the integrative science and spatial modeling needed to support the statewide action plan. Work is just getting underway with the first products becoming available during the summer months of this year. Stay tuned for an update as this important project progresses.
Upcoming Data Basin Newsletter
Starting in mid-April, CBI will be coming out with a new, monthly newsletter for our sister website, Data Basin! Be the first to know about new tools, updated datasets, and a few tips and tricks on how best to utilize the site!
Publication: Widespread synchronous decline of Mediterranean-type forest driven by accelerated aridity
Our Senior Research Scientist, Alexandra Syphard, is a co-author of the paper, Widespread synchronous decline of Mediterranean-type forest driven by accelerated aridity. This article highlights the abrupt, large-scale ecosystem change in the form of climate-induced tree mortality. By assessing climatic and productivity trends across the world’s five Mediterranean forest ecosystems from 2000 to 2021, researchers have detected extensive forest browning and productivity decline in Chile – and given the ongoing decline in regional water balance, the sustained recovery of this forest is uncertain. The unprecedented wildfires in Chile, which began last month, are believed to be the deadliest on record killing hundreds of people and reducing entire neighborhoods to ash.
New Publication: The geography of social vulnerability and wildfire occurrence (1984–2018) in the conterminous USA
Rapidly increasing in severity every year, wildfires are a natural hazard that affects different populations unequally. Our Senior Research Scientist, Alexandra Syphard, has co-authored a new publication, The geography of social vulnerability and wildfire occurrence (1984–2018) in the Conterminous USA which explores how characteristics of social vulnerability are associated with wildfire occurrence nationwide. By identifying all non-urban census tracts in the USA that have experienced a wildfire since 1984, and by using 26 different measures of social vulnerability, the research team compared this data to that of non-urban census tracts that have not experienced a wildfire. They found the following notable social vulnerabilities in areas that have experienced wildfire over this time period: (1) higher unemployment rates, (2) higher employment in extractive industries, (3) larger percentage of people living in mobile homes, (4) greater percentage of Native Americans, (5) larger percentage of people with less than 12th-grade education, (6) higher populations of people with special needs.
Having broken the data down into eight different regions and comparing tracts with a high proportion of wildland-urban interface to that of a low proportion of wildland-urban interface, researchers found that these social vulnerability characteristics are generally consistent across all regions of the country.