CDFW Conservation Lecture Series Archive

Most threatened and endangered species face an uphill battle to recovery, and managers must contend with multiple limiting factors. Adding to this is the looming threat posed by climate change. The federally-listed Pacific coast population of the western plover is on the front lines of climate change, with respect to rising sea levels, which are expected to dramatically reduce available sandy beach habitat over the next several decades. In order to improve our understanding of climate threats, we developed a conceptual framework of predicted climate impacts, secondary effects, and species and habitat vulnerabilities. To test the predictions in the framework, we analyzed long-term spatially-explicit data from Monterey Bay and Point Reyes National Seashore to determine the relationship between plover productivity and multiple climate and habitat variables, and then projected future productivity across the landscape. The original conceptual framework is effective at predicting threats, which is corroborated by the analysis. Moreover, we identified probable causal mechanisms underlying climate-productivity relationships, which provide a strong foundation for future management to improve the resilience of the species and the beach ecosystem. 

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In April 2022, the California Natural Resources Agency released its Pathways to 30x30 strategy for conserving 30% of California’s land and coastal waters by 2030 to protect and restore biodiversity, expand access to nature, and mitigate and build resilience to climate change. Public participation and input were critical in helping the state identify strategies that reflect local and regional conservation priorities. Continued collaboration and learning will be key for successfully implementing Pathways to 30x30. Utilizing community science and the collective observations of plants and animals is an opportunity to expand our understanding of biodiversity in California and best identify important places to conserve. Join us in a conversation with community science champions to learn more about how we can work together to achieve California’s 30x30 goal.

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Life cycle models generate predictions at scales relevant to conservation and are an advantageous approach to managing and conserving anadromous salmon that use multiple habitats throughout their life cycle. This presentation will walk through how life cycle monitoring data throughout Redwood Creek was integrated into a life cycle model to evaluate restoration potential in different habitats. 

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The "AIMS for Wildlife" concept builds upon technological advances in wildlife monitoring, cloud computing and artificial intelligence to deliver powerful wildlife monitoring data in real-time. Advances in telemetry techniques such as GSM based transmitters utilizing the cellular networks to transmit data and which collect precise (GPS quality) location data at high frequency and accessible in real-time. The AIMS approach uses cloud based computing resources to integrate remotely sensed data (weather, habitat, etc.) with animal movement data and provide it to a variety of end users (refuge managers, species biologists, etc.) in near real-time.

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Climate-change refugia are locations that species can retreat to and persist in to escape or reduce the impacts of declining climatic suitability. As such, refugia have a critical role to play in protecting species from climate-change impacts. In this seminar, I review practical strategies for mapping climate-change refugia to support species conservation, covering tools and approaches that wildlife managers can start using today to incorporate refugia into their wildlife conservation strategies.

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Natural resource stewards are increasingly confronting the limits of a conservation and management paradigm that relies on ecological baselines to guide protection, restoration, and other management actions. Intensifying climate change-including accelerated warming, changing disturbance regimes, and more frequent and intense extreme events-combined with effects of more longstanding stressors, is making restoration of past conditions or even ’holding the line’ in the face of inexorable human-caused change ever more difficult and costly. In response, managers are increasingly expanding their toolkit to include explicitly and strategically accepting or even directing human-caused ecological trajectories. New thinking in the National Park Service along these lines is expressed in several related new guidance documents including a report on the Resist-Accept-Direct (RAD) framework. The RAD framework, the culmination of years of collaboration among a diverse set of conservation partners, helps managers make informed, purposeful choices about how to respond to the trajectory of change. This presentation will describe the challenge of ecological transformation, introduce the RAD framework, discuss how applying it is shaped by a range of social factors, and share real-world examples.

Presentation PDF available upon request.

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The Elkhorn Slough Reserve is actively engaged in the removal of about 1,200 eucalyptus trees, an invasive species from Australia that was planted through much of coastal California about 100 years ago. This is not without some public opposition; in fact, many people consider these trees to be "naturalized" and an integral part of the ecology of California. One grove was left due to its sporadic use by monarch butterflies. The removal of these trees has resulted in an impressive transition to native coast live oak woodlands and landscape views that are reminiscent of pre-contact conditions.

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One of the most fundamental questions underpinning biodiversity conservation is: Where do species and ecosystems occur? Common decisions in conservation, including land and water acquisition priorities, the location and approach for restoration projects, and the degree of protection conferred to a species or habitat rely on accurate spatial depictions of the range-wide distribution of species and ecosystems. Through advances in dynamic ecological modeling, cloud-based computing, and innovative workflows that leverage community science, refined maps of species distributions can dramatically improve the basis for effective and strategic conservation actions, from local to landscape scales. Dr. Healy Hamilton, Chief Scientist at NatureServe, will demonstrate an iterative and collaborative ecological modelling process for producing refined species and ecosystem distributions, and provide example applications for their relevance to conservation actions.

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Focusing on Suisun Marsh and the north Delta, Dr. Durand discusses a few different types of wetlands and management strategies, including restoration, managed and abandoned sites, and evaluate the responses of food webs and fishes. 

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The Buena Vista Lake shrew (Sorex ornatus relictus) formerly inhabited the interconnected seasonal and permanent lakes, wetlands, sloughs, and marshes around historic Tulare, Kern and Buena Vista lakes in the Tulare Basin of the San Joaquin Valley. Approximately 95% of riparian and wetland habitat in the San Joaquin Valley has been lost, leaving only isolated remnants of suitable habitat where shrews still persist. Our objectives were to (1) complete a taxonomic review of shrews in the San Joaquin Valley via genetic analyses, (2) evaluate the status of BVLS on sites where it was previous detected, (3) conduct surveys and habitat assessments on previously unsurveyed sites, (4) investigate non-invasive detection techniques, and (5) develop conservation recommendations based on our results.

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