CDFW Conservation Lecture Series Archive

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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Recent headlines about global insect declines and three billion fewer birds in North America are a bleak reality check about how ineffective our current landscape designs have been at sustaining the plants and animals that sustain us. Such losses are not an option if we wish to continue our current standard of living on Planet Earth. The good news is that none of this is inevitable. Dr. Tallamy discusses simple steps that each of us can- and must take to reverse declining biodiversity, why we must change our adversarial relationship with nature to a collaborative one, and why we, ourselves, are nature’s best hope.

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Over the past 150 years, human actions have altered the tidal, freshwater, and sediment processes that are essential to support and sustain Elkhorn Slough (Monterey County). Large areas of tidal marshes were diked and drained in the 20th century. This caused subsidence and when dikes failed, the areas were too low to support healthy marsh. In these previously diked areas the salt marsh habitat is almost entirely gone with just sparse fringing marsh in narrow bands along the shoreline. In addition to this habitat degradation, modeling suggests most of Elkhorn Slough’s remaining marshes will be lost within 50 years due to sea-level rise. The 122-acre Hester marsh restoration project is the first large scale restoration of its type, in this estuary. Over 400,000 cubic yards of soil brings the marsh up to a sustainable elevation, high in the tidal frame. The project used cutting edge drone technology to track implementation and incorporated a large ecotone planting experiment. Restoring this degraded habitat took many hands from planning to planting and highlights the importance of a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach to restoring sustainable habitat for the future.

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Please join us for an overview of the CDFW statewide Cannabis Program. Since its inception with a small enforcement team in the Emerald Triangle in 2014, the cannabis program has rapidly expanded with the legalization of cannabis in California. The Cannabis Program is unique, in that it encompasses all of the Department’s varied roles, such as permitting, outreach, wildlife monitoring, grants, enforcement, and land management. Please join us to learn about the history of the program, the regulations guiding it, how it is funded, why it exists, how it operates, and why it is so important for protecting California’s natural resources.

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Pollinators are critical to ecosystem function, yet some populations have declined precipitously in the past 20 years. We discuss trends in pollinator decline, focusing on the monarch butterfly and CA SGCN bumble bee species. Then we review actions CDFW is taking to support their recovery, including engaging community scientists to collect data to fill in knowledge gaps and enhancing habitat throughout our properties to increase resources for pollinators.

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The newly-released Stephens’ Kangaroo Rat Rangewide Management and Monitoring Plan synthesizes information about the endangered Stephens’ kangaroo rat (SKR; Dipodomys stephensi, a rare mammal endemic to western Riverside County and northern San Diego County), presents a comprehensive, rangewide species management and monitoring strategy, and outlines specific next steps for collaborative implementation of the strategy across more than 30 organizations. It is intended to help agencies responsible for SKR conservation to manage threats and track changes important for SKR recovery more efficiently and effectively. It will also support these agencies in coordinating strategically to promote rangewide species conservation goals so that local SKR conservation actions within particular reserves or Habitat Conservation Areas can contribute to SKR conservation at the broader rangewide scale. This project was spearheaded by Riverside County Habitat Conservation Agency (RCHCA) and funded by the Bureau of Land Management. The SKR Rangewide Management and Monitoring Plan was prepared by Conservation Biology Institute (CBI) working closely with Riverside County Habitat Conservation Agency (RCHCA), Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and a working group of over fifty species experts and land managers responsible for SKR conservation.

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