Science-based grazing management is crucial to preserving and improving rangeland productivity and sagebrush ecosystem health. We developed a grazing planning tool (GPT) that operationalizes the science around grazing to guide planning and adaptive management and to help producers and managers plan grazing logistics within a pasture or allotment and support operations while protecting or improving ecological resilience. The tool centralizes several spatial datasets integral to grazing planning and management, including vegetation cover, biomass, water features, wildfires, ecological monitoring, sensitive wildlife habitat, and ecological resilience. Within the tool, users can query and interact with the data to address objectives at the pasture or allotment level, such as: where biomass is available to cattle, how water or fences can be used to change availability, what areas are suited for targeted or prescribed grazing, and what areas would benefit from rotational grazing to avoid wildlife conflicts. The tool can be used as a map viewer, allowing users to visualize pasture and allotment conditions through time. The tool aims to provide an interactive and easy-to-use framework, to support common goals for all stakeholder groups working toward productive and resilient rangelands. Information is preliminary and provided for best timely science.

Throughout California, wildlife and their habitats occur on a mosaic of public and private lands. Public agency operations on fee title (owned) lands received as gifts or acquired as mitigation are guided by mandates and regional priorities. However, adequate personnel and infrastructure is often insufficient on agency properties, making progress toward management objectives challenging, delayed, and ineffective at times. Private land conservation tools such as conservation easements are well-accepted as effectively protecting key properties’ natural resources activities, while eliminating threats of land conversion and sub-division in perpetuity. This talk explores the various alternatives an agency has when receiving a property in fee-title, and makes a case for selecting a local land trust or sovereign tribe as suitable fee-title holder and land steward, while still achieving regional priorities and agency mandates related to wildlife, habitats, and ecological processes. Land Trusts and Sovereign tribes promote community-led conservation, outreach and education, and ecological restoration. A new tool related to water rights easements for conservation is also introduced.

Protected areas, which restrict activities perceived to be harmful for resources of interest, are a central element of Western conservation thought. Since the late 1800s, protected areas in the western US have served an essential role in safeguarding sensitive and culturally important resources and landscapes from destruction by their primary threats: urban/suburban development and natural resource extraction. However, the primary threat to western US landscapes is now uncharacteristic landscape disturbances, including megafires and megadroughts, that can erase protected areas and the sensitive resources they contain from the map in one fell swoop. This raises the question: are protected areas still working in the era of mega-disturbance? In this talk, I will discuss the unintended consequences of well-meaning protectionism in California and in the Northwest Forest Plan area, and specifically as it relates to the conservation of old-forest habitats of the California spotted owl and the southern Sierra Nevada fisher. Recent empirical evidence suggests that habitat loss for these species may be occurring more rapidly in protected areas than in unprotected areas, warranting a re-evaluation of traditional static models of conservation to more dynamic models that seek to conserve natural dynamics as opposed to static desired conditions.

The U.S. Forest Service has launched the Trespass Cultivation Ecology, Safety, and Reclamation (TCESR) program to address the impacts of illicit cannabis cultivation on National Forest System lands. The TCESR program aims to mitigate the environmental damage caused by cannabis cultivation on federal public lands, protect wildlife and humans, conserve National Forest Lands from hazardous materials left behind, and ensure the safety of those tasked with monitoring and reclaiming these sites. This initiative represents a significant step towards preserving the integrity of our National Forests in alignment with the intent of these lands to be set aside for public use. In addition to the objectives above, the TCESR program will also establish prioritization criteria for research, monitoring projects, and reclamation of cultivation sites. These criteria will focus on areas with endangered species, their critical habitats, regions of environmental significance, and corridors crucial for wildlife conservation efforts. This multifaceted strategy ensures that resources are allocated and applied effectively to protect and conserve the most vulnerable and significant areas within our National Forests. The talk will focus on the TCESR overview, examples of TCESR efforts to conserve wildlife populations, and the applied management techniques to conserve wildlife and their habitats.

It is now well-known that illicit cannabis cultivation impacts many species of forest wildlife, either by direct mortality or indirectly through sublethal exposure to pesticides, water theft, and habitat manipulation. Given the rampant spread of illegal cultivation in northwestern California over the past two decades and our lack of knowledge about how these activities impact mountain lions (Puma concolor) and the species they rely on for food, we studied the risks to mountain lions from illegal cannabis cultivation and the pesticides associated with this activity. For the first phase of this project, our objectives were to: 1) analyze prey selection and spatial foraging patterns of lions in northwestern California; 2) visit kill sites to determine diet and exposure of prey to anticoagulant rodenticides and other toxicants found at trespass cannabis grow sites; and 3) analyze lion movement and home ranges in relation to the distribution of both public land cannabis cultivation sites and private land, unlicensed sites on the National Forests and private lands adjacent to the Hoopa Valley Reservation in northwestern California.

Land-use change, including agricultural expansion, is one of the major drivers of biodiversity loss globally. Given the rapid pace of land-use change, data-driven, strategic, and dynamic conservation planning is imperative. We present an exemplar application of using existing data to inform conservation planning. Specifically, we developed a systematic approach for identifying areas of conservation concern due to cannabis cultivation in California, USA. We used three existing datasets: 1) camera trap data from ten projects (n = 1,186); 2) the locations of cannabis cultivation sites eradicated by law enforcement (n = 834); and 3) the locations of cultivation licenses (n = 4,366). We analyzed this data using multi-species occupancy models to estimate the occupancy and richness of 30 species, and maximum entropy models to estimate the risk of unlicensed and trespass cultivation. We then identified areas of overlap and determined the percent of suitable habitat potentially impacted by cannabis cultivation. Our results can be used to prioritize eradication, restoration, and remediation activities and to target mitigation efforts and grant funded activities. Further, our study demonstrates the utility of aggregating existing biological and socioeconomic data to inform conservation planning.