CDFW Conservation Lecture Series Archive

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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Illegal poaching and wildlife trafficking is the fourth largest transcontinental crime, worth an estimated $20 billion each year. In an effort to curb ivory trafficking in California, a law was enacted in 2015 (AB 96, codified as Fish and Game Code section 2022) that prohibits the purchase, sale, offer for sale, possession with intent to sell, or importation with intent to sell of ivory from elephant, mammoth, and mastodon as well as other non-proboscidean species. The CDFW Forensics Lab has developed an assay that can distinguish between the 4 proboscidean taxa protected under California’s ivory law and are required to either be identified or excluded from casework consideration - African elephant (Loxodonta spp.), Asian elephant (Elephas maximus), mammoth (Mammuthus spp.), and mastodon (Mammut spp.). Kelly discusses this assay and its utility, as well as her efforts to geolocate African elephant ivory to its source country using a combination of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA, thereby increasing the utility of this assay in law enforcement situations.

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Dr. Hugh Safford summarizes historical, current, and projected future patterns and trends in fire and vegetation in California. Burned area is increasing rapidly in California (and principally in northern California), but in most years it is still notably below pre-Euroamerican settlement averages. The real issue is the way that fires are burning, not their area. Huge increases in the amount of forest fire area burning at high severity (aka "stand-replacing") are leading to issues with forest regeneration, vegetation type conversion, ecosystem services, and loss of key habitat for important wildlife species of conservation concern.

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Fire is both a widespread natural disturbance that affects the distribution and abundance of species and a tool that can be used to manage habitats for species. Knowledge of temporal changes in the occurrence of species after fire is essential for conservation management in fire-prone environments. Despite the evolutionary importance of fire in California, we are entering an unprecedented period where the dominant nature of fire is rapidly changing, disrupting both human and animal lives. In this lecture, Morgan Tingley discusses the myriad ways that fire shapes the ecology of birds in California and what we know and don’t know about what our flammable future may hold. Recording is no longer available.

Understanding the potential stress of climate change on vegetation can help guide conservation and land management decisions. Climatic stress varies across the distribution of each vegetation type. Vegetation refugia are areas where climatic stress is expected to remain within the tolerance level of a given vegetation type-areas where the vegetation and the species that depend on these habitats might find refuge in the face of climate change. We discuss a vegetation vulnerability and refugia dataset that was developed for California, how this data has been applied to the habitat maps of 522 terrestrial vertebrate species, and other conservation applications of the data.

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Niche models were fitted iteratively between 2015 and 2020 followed by field validation of the predicted suitable sites with focus on suitable sites adjacent to the known locations of Ivesia webberi. True absence points and new locations discovered during field validations were added to the spatial datasets for subsequent niche modeling iterations. This resulted in a significant improvement in the predictive accuracy of the niche models and resulted in the discovery of novel locations and expansion of the range of the threatened plant species.

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