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.

This presentation explores the Karuk Tribe’s efforts to restore forest habitats degraded by logging and the absence of traditional fire, through the integration of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and modern wildlife monitoring techniques. Using Acoustic Recording Units (ARUs), game cameras, GPS collar data for ungulates, and GPS loggers for turtles, our team is building a biodiversity monitoring system to guide restoration. These efforts aim to address the loss of biodiversity and the overgrown, homogenized forests left by past disturbances. The Karuk people have lived in harmony with this landscape since time immemorial, guided by a deep physical, emotional, and spiritual connection to their homelands. This enduring relationship, passed through generations, enables the Tribe to restore the land to its natural balance. By combining TEK with modern tools, we are filling knowledge gaps and creating sustainable restoration strategies that reflect Indigenous wisdom. Yootva (thank you) for considering this work. We are eager to share how the integration of Karuk TEK with modern wildlife science supports biodiversity conservation and the healing of Karuk Ancestral Lands.

Disturbances shape assemblages and spatial patterns of flora and fauna across the globe and accurate disturbance mapping can aid scientists and land managers. However, differentiating between disturbance types using remote sensing is challenging, especially in forests with hidden subcanopy disturbances. On federal lands in the western US, wildfire, drought, and fuel management are three primary disturbance agents. The USFS's Forest Activity Tracking System (FACTS) provides nationwide fuels management data on USFS lands. While FACTS data seem useful, they have not been widely utilized, partially due to missing data and uncertainty. We compared FACTS polygons (prescribed fire, mechanical, and manual fuel reduction) with annual predictions of canopy loss (Mortality Magnitude Index in the eDaRT system for Landsat processing) and assessed their spatial and temporal accuracy in the primarily forested Sierra Nevada, CA. We also examined missing treatments and cases without completion dates. We then characterized annual disturbance across 20 years (2003-2022) in Sierra Nevada USFS lands. Overall, 68% of USFS lands were disturbed (1.5 million ha). Of the 1.5 million ha disturbed, 66% was wildfire, 19% fuel management, and 41% drought (other mortality), with some disturbance overlap. These data can aid scientists and managers studying and caring for these rapidly-changing ecosystems.

The coastal marten (Martes caurina humboldtensis) is a federally threatened small carnivore endemic to western Oregon and California. Due to their patchy distribution and elusive nature, coastal martens are challenging to monitor and most broad-based surveys use presence-nondetection methods such as camera-traps or scat detection dogs. Given limited information on population numbers, critical knowledge gaps for coastal marten conservation are population abundances, demographics, connectivity, and habitat associations. To fill these gaps, we generated genomic data and developed a SNP-based noninvasive genetic panel for sexing and identifying individual martens from scat samples. Our genomic data show genetic erosion of coastal martens consistent with small, isolated populations. We assess the effectiveness of our noninvasive panel for identifying individuals, tracking population structure, and estimating individual-level inbreeding and genetic diversity. Finally, we apply this panel to genotype marten scats collected between 2015-2023 and provide the first assessment of minimum population sizes and rangewide population structure. The ability to genotype scats opens the door to monitoring coastal marten density, demographics, and habitat associations. Future work will focus on developing a second noninvasive genetic panel targeted at building pedigrees and improving resolution for inference on genetic connectivity and developing similar panels for fishers (Pekania pennanti).

Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area is the nation’s largest urban park and has lacked knowledge about its small mammal communities. Information on small mammal natural history, species richness, and abundance is needed by managers to determine where small mammals occur and where they are the most diverse. We used live-traps to characterize the small mammal community at 30 sites in the two most abundant habitat types: chaparral and coastal sage scrub. The sites were co-located with existing long-term vegetation survey sites, and vegetation structure covariates were considered to explain the variation in small mammal distribution and diversity. Capture success was high, and we captured 11 native species, including 2 heteromyids, 5 Peromyscus species, 2 woodrats, harvest mice and voles, the full predicted small mammal fauna. We found healthy small mammal communities in both habitat types and across the park. These baseline data will be used to measure the success of native plant restoration projects and verify that restored areas function as habitat for small mammals. Small mammals are a good proxy for general wildlife response to restoration, because rodents interact with native plants through seed predation, herbivory, and soil disturbance, and are a critical food source for predators.

California is considered a biodiversity hotspot based on its high species richness and endemism, and the threats to ecosystems that support these species. Small mammals are key components of healthy ecosystems, serving as seed and fungal dispersers, prey, and habitat engineers. Recently, Sierra Nevada ecosystems have experienced an increasing amount of change, including climate change, more severe and frequent fires, and associated vegetation change. Small mammals are demonstrably sensitive to changes in climate and habitat, but the long-term influence of fire on small mammal communities is poorly understood. We aim to explore the drivers of small mammal richness, focusing on fire, habitat, and climate. Historical survey and resurvey projects provide high-quality species occurrence data from the last century in the Sierra Nevada. Results indicate that historic fire regime plays a key role explaining variation in modern small mammal richness across the Sierra Nevada and that inclusion of variables related to fire improves model fit compared to models with just climate and habitat. Overall, our work contributes knowledge on the factors influencing small mammal communities in an era of global change.