The California Endangered Species Act (CESA) facilitates the listing and conservation of threatened and endangered species in California. It is state policy to conserve, protect, restore, and enhance listed species, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) is charged with conducting scientific reviews of species petitioned for listing, administering permitting programs to authorize take of listed species, and conducting periodic status reviews of listed species. While CESA provides protection for listed and candidate species, until recently, CDFW has had neither the funding nor the authority to prepare recovery plans providing a conservation roadmap and delisting criteria for those species. In 2019, CDFW was given authority to produce recovery plans and, in 2021, was provided funding for positions to coordinate recovery planning. Future recovery plans will provide recovery frameworks and criteria for numerous CESA-listed plants and animals, many of which have no current federal recovery plan or conservation strategy. Our first steps include creation of recovery panning guidelines to ensure consistency and prioritization of species which are most likely to benefit from a recovery plan. Recovery planning will involve collaboration with multiple partners including local, state, and federal agencies, academics, conservation organizations, landowners, and the public.

California is experiencing a wildfire crisis. California’s Forest Carbon Plan and Shared Stewardship Agreement call for federal and state agencies to treat 1 million acres annually by 2025. The California Vegetation Treatment Program (CalVTP) is a cornerstone in California’s strategy to increase the pace and scale of vegetation treatment to address the wildfire crisis. It has become an essential tool to expedite CEQA compliance for wildfire resilience projects and facilitate efficient permitting, with linkages to the federal and state endangered species acts, the California Coastal Act, and other regulations. Since CalVTP implementation began in 2020, the CalVTP has provided CEQA compliance for over 350,000 cumulative acres in California. The presentation will provide an overview of the CalVTP and strategies for regulatory compliance. Current trends, real-world examples, and lessons learned about how to maximize the usefulness of the CalVTP will be shared. Despite recent advancements, at a spring 2023 meeting California’s Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot appealed to the California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force to “work even bigger, faster, and more collaboratively” given the urgency of the crisis. The CalVTP is a useful tool to meet this challenge.

Biological resources are a substantive focus when preparing and implementing a Project-Specific Analysis (PSA) under the California Vegetation Treatment Program (CalVTP) Program Environmental Impact Report (EIR). The Board of Forestry and Fire Protection has collected feedback about how to support efficient CalVTP use, and to this end, has recently released the CalVTP Resource Library, a set of new tools and resources to increase efficiency. The Resource Library features example PSAs, Mitigation Monitoring and Reporting Program Implementation Tools, and updated Frequently Asked Questions. The example PSAs cover a variety of geographies, treatment types and activities, and environmental issues throughout the state. Implementation tools provide organizational and planning aids focused on biological resources to achieve the goal of increasing the pace and scale of critical wildfire resilience treatments while protecting sensitive resources. These resources highlight specific challenges that have been encountered during the preparation of PSAs and approaches to resolving these issues, such as vegetation treatment within sensitive natural communities, maintenance of habitat function for special-status species, and the required agency coordination process.

The legacy of fire exclusion, coupled with rapid changes in climate, have led to a dramatic increase in the frequency of large-magnitude disturbances across the west, including massive, high-severity stand-replacing fires. Given the scale of disturbance and implementation challenges, research and monitoring are needed to help prioritize management actions on the landscape including reducing or modifying forest fuels, facilitating reforestation, reducing the spread of invasive species, and maintaining forested habitat that can support wildlife populations. To tackle these challenges several research scientists from the USFS Pacific Southwest and Pacific Northwest Research Stations combined their expertise to develop a single, robust sampling design to answer some of the major land management questions emerging in this era of uncharacteristic wildfire and uncertain climate affects. Desired outcomes for this research are to (1) collaborate with managers to prioritize management actions where they are most needed through the development of a restoration portfolio that, (2) incorporate research plans targeted to the restoration decisions, and (3) improve an understanding of the efficacy of different management actions to direct future landscape conditions that can support functioning ecosystems.

Amid increasing concerns about wildfires in the West, land managers require tools to evaluate the benefits and consequences of implementing management objectives across diverse landscapes. A common management objective is short-term fire risk reduction, the second one is multiple resource benefits which focuses on longer-term resilience, including the conservation of biodiversity. Using optimization modeling, we evaluated the compatibility of these objectives across 980,000 hectares in the central Sierra Nevada, California, at two levels of accomplishment: 50% and 75% per planning unit. At the 50% level, there was little overlap between the hectares selected for treatment in the fire and the ecosystem scenarios. At the 75% level, areas selected for each scenario overlapped substantially, indicating that tradeoffs would be required. We evaluated the magnitude of benefits gained by these two scenarios using socio-ecological outcomes across 10 pillars of resilience. We witnessed slight increases in species richness following treatment in both the fire and ecosystem scenarios, but greater biodiversity benefits were achieved with the ecosystem scenario. Our findings demonstrate that there is potential for concordance between short-term fire risk mitigation and long-term resilience goals, and that both can be implemented in order to maximize benefits across different aspects of the landscape.

Long-term monitoring is crucial to understanding how ecosystems change over time at local, regional, and state-wide scales, which informs management strategies and actions aimed at conserving California’s biodiversity. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) is working with several partners to establish a Climate-Biodiversity Sentinel Site Network to monitor ecosystems and wildlife on public lands and inform land management in the face of climate change and other stressors. As part of this ongoing and growing effort, CDFW sentinel sites are being established on select Wildlife Areas and Ecological Reserves across the state. Each sentinel site will host a series of weather and soil sensors for climate monitoring, suites of wildlife cameras and acoustic sensors, and permanent vegetation plots for biodiversity monitoring, a Motus tower to monitor animal movement, and more. Resulting data is being processed with multiple automated and machine learning tools and will allow scientists to evaluate links between climate change and effects on local species and ecosystems. This presentation will include preliminary data collected during the first field season. Understanding the effects of climate change at multiple spatial, temporal, and taxonomic scales can support adaptive land-management decisions and inform long-term goals and strategies for conserving California’s biodiversity.