Monitoring is an essential aspect of the job for wildlife and environmental professionals but due to climate change, access to the land is becoming more difficult. Remote monitoring via satellite imagery has allowed the Northern California Regional Land Trust to continue annual monitoring requirements and to track progress across all active projects even when the project area is inaccessible. In 2023, the Land Trust successfully implemented remote monitoring on all conservation easement and fee title properties, more than 40,000 acres in Northern California. Integrating remote monitoring into monitoring protocol noticeably reduced monitoring costs, staff field time, and staff risk due to illegal growing operations, while also expanding staff knowledge for each property. Remote monitoring made it possible to monitor growth and disruptions in forests, track progress of reforestation efforts, analyze historical fires and current fire recover, evaluate carbon projects through vegetation growth, confirm parcel data, and measure biodiversity intactness and species richness, despite the catastrophic wildfires and severe flooding seen throughout the Land Trust’s service area in recent years. The natural world around us is changing rapidly, remote monitoring enables wildlife and environmental professionals to adjust and adapt to current conditions from year to year.

Hannah Espinosa graduated from the University of Kentucky in 2015 with a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry and Biology. She then went on to attend Middlesex University in London, England, where she graduated in 2018 with her Master of Science in Biodiversity, Evolution, and Conservation in Action. Since then, she has worked with both federal agencies across multiple national forests and non-profits in wildlife conservation, natural resource planning and monitoring, and wilderness management. As the Stewardship Director, Hannah leads the NCRLT’s stewardship program in conservation transaction management, resource planning, and monitoring procedures for more than 40,000 acres of protected land.