Heather Tallis, Katharine Kreis, Lydia Olander, Claudia Ringler, David Ameyaw, Mark E Borsuk, Diana Fletschner, Edward Game,, Daniel O Gilligan, Marc Jeuland, Gina Kennedy, Yuta J Masuda, Sumi Mehta, Nicholas Miller, Megan Parker, Carmel Pollino, Julie Rajaratnam, David Wilkie, Wei Zhang, Selena Ahmed, Oluyede C Ajayi, Harold Alderman, George Arhonditsis, Ines Azevedo, Ruchi Badola, Rob Bailis, Patricia Balvanera, Emily Barbour, Mark Bardini, David N Barton, Jill Baumgartner, Tim G Benton, Emily Bobrow, Deborah Bossio, Ann Bostrom, Ademola Braimoh, Eduardo Brondizio, Joe Brown, Benjamin P Bryant, Ryan SD Calder, Becky Chaplin-Kramer, Alison Cullen, Nicole DeMello, Katherine L Dickinson, Kristie L Ebi, Heather E Eves, Jessica Fanzo, Paul J Ferraro, Brendan Fisher, Edward A Frongillo, Gillian Galford, Dennis Garrity, Lydiah Gatere, Andrew P Grieshop, Nicola J Grigg, Craig Groves, Mary Kay Gugerty, Michael Hamm, Xiaoyue Hou, Cindy Huang, Marc Imhoff, Darby Jack, Andrew D Jones, Rodd Kelsey, Monica Kothari, Ritesh Kumar, Carl Lachat, Ashley Larsen, Mark Lawrence, Fabrice DeClerck, Phillip S Levin, Edward Mabaya, Jacqueline MacDonald Gibson, Robert I McDonald, Georgina Mace, Ricardo Maertens, Dorothy I Mangale, Robin Martino, Sara Mason, Lyla Mehta, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, Barbara Merz, Siwa Msangi, Grant Murray, Kris A Murray, Celeste E Naude, Nathaniel K Newlands, Ephraim Nkonya, Amber Peterman, Tricia Petruney, Hugh Possingham, Jyotsna Puri, Roseline Remans, Lisa Remlinger, Taylor H Ricketts, Bedilu Reta, Brian E Robinson, Dilys Roe, Joshua Rosenthal, Guofeng Shen, Drew Shindell, Ben Stewart-Koster, Terry Sunderland, William J Sutherland, Josh Tewksbury, Heather Wasser, Stephanie Wear, Chris Webb, Dale Whittington, Marit Wilkerson, Heidi Wittmer, Benjamin DK Wood, Stephen Wood,, Joyce Wu, Gautam Yadama and Stephanie Zobrist
Although environmental conservation, human health, and sustainable development challenges are interconnected, approaches to these challenges and the evidence used remain disconnected. Creating integrated solutions across these sectors will require better alignment of the methods used to assess the problems and quantifying success. In this review, The Bridge Collaborative, a research-practice collaboration, presents principles and recommendations that help integrate methods for evidence generation and use across conservation, health and development sectors. Recommendations were generated in the context of designing and evaluating evidence of impact for interventions related to five global challenges (stabilizing the global climate, making food production sustainable, decreasing air pollution and respiratory disease, improving sanitation and water security, and solving hunger and malnutrition). These serve as a starting point for further iteration and testing in a broader set of contexts and disciplines. We adopted six principles and emphasize three methodological recommendations: (1) creation of compatible theories of change, (2) consideration of all relevant types of evidence, and (3) evaluation of strength of evidence using a unified approach. We provide detailed suggestions for how these recommendations can be applied in practice.
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William T. Bean, H. Scott Butterfield, Craig Fiehler, David Hacker, Jeanette K. Howard, Russell Namitz, Brandon Swanson, Thomas J. Batter
TNC launched a Water for Wildlife project motivated by understanding the importance of standing free water across the season for wildlife in general, but most importantly for those species sensitive to water availability during times of the year when water is typically limiting in California,…
Michael J. Clifford, Sophie S. Parker, Brian S. Cohen, Elaine York, Joel Tuhy
This paper provides an assessment of changes in the conservation value of lands in the Mojave Desert of Nevada and Utah resulting from renewable energy and other development between 2010 and 2018. The authors use conservation value as determined by the Mojave Desert Ecoregional…
The Nature Conservancy with Willis Towers Watson, Sarah Heard
California has the highest wildfire risk in the US, and climate change will continue to exacerbate the risk, at least in the foreseeable future. As a result, California is facing an insurance crisis, as insurers are finding it harder and harder to write insurance in…
Trish Smith, Cheryl Brehme, Jill Carpenter, Nancy Frost, Megan Jennings, Barbara Kus, Scott Quinnell, Spring Strahm, T. Winston Vickers
The Nature Conservancy and the California Department of Transportation are planning 3 wildlife crossing infrastructure projects along a 3-mile stretch of Interstate 15 (I-15) in the Santa Ana-Palomar Mountains Linkage in southern California. While wildlife crossings are becoming more common, optimal designs that meet the…
Adam H. Love, Andy Zdon, Naomi S. Fraga, Brian Cohen, Maura Palacios Mejia, Rachel Maxwell, Sophie Parker
This paper presents results from the Mojave Desert Springs research project. The authors present a comprehensive statistical analysis of similarities between California desert springs. An observed lack of correlation between the springs’ hydrologic and ecological parameters suggests that each spring represents a somewhat unique…
Michele Romolini, Sophie S. Parker, Gregory B. Pauly, Eric M. Wood
This editorial introduces a group of 11 articles published as part of an organized research topic in the Urban Greening section of the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Cities. In contrast with the abundance of literature that describes the negative impacts of humans and anthropogenic change,…
Christopher M. Free, Lyall F. Bellquist, Karin A. Forney, Jenn Humberstone, Kate Kauer, Qui Lee, Owen R. Liu, Jameal F. Samhouri, Jono R. Wilson, Darcy Bradley
Dynamic ocean management frameworks can be a useful approach to fisheries management under climate change. In the oceans, marine heatwaves are increasingly common symptoms of climate change that can impact ecosystems, economies, and communities. The recent 2014-2016 marine heatwave in the NE Pacific resulted in…
Suman Jumani, Lucy Andrews, Theodore E. Grantham, S. Kyle McKay, Jeffrey Duda, Jeanette Howard
California has a dam problem. Since the start of the 20th century, the state has built thousands of dams on its rivers and streams. Now, more than 75% of the largest dams are greater than 50 years old. This means that a significant proportion of…
Kristen N. Wilson, Patricia N. Manley
Climate change, high-severity wildfire, and drought threaten the resilience of forests and communities in the Sierra Nevada. The Tahoe–Central Sierra Initiative (TCSI) is a partnership of state and federal agencies, non-governmental organizations, the timber industry, and researchers that was established to improve resilience to climate…
Kristen Wilson, Dale W. Johnson, Douglas F. Ryan, ed.
Authored by TNC staff and colleague, Chapter 8 of this report synthesizes environmental monitoring and studies performed at Sagehen Experimental Forest that are relevant to water quality regulatory agencies. Water quality in the basin is mainly controlled by groundwater emerging in springs, but wildland fires,…
Patricia N. Manley, Nicholas A. Povak, Kristen Wilson, Kristen Wilson, Mary Lou Fairweather, Vivian Griffey
The Blueprint is a set of strategy maps that identify opportunities for forest protection and adaptation across a 2.4-million-acre region of the central Sierra Nevada. It uses a novel application of the Ecosystem Management Decision Support (EMDS) tool to evaluate spatial data layers against target…
James W. Roche, Kristen N. Wilson, Qin Ma, Roger C. Bales
This study evaluated the water balance components of precipitation, evapotranspiration, discharge, and change in storage compared to measured streamflow and unregulated streamflow estimates in the central Sierra Nevada. The fifty-two watersheds varied in size and in elevation. This study found that the evapotranspiration estimates plus gridded…
Benjamin P. Bryant, Tessa Maurer, Phillip C. Saksa, John D. Herman, Kristen N. Wilson, Edward Smith
The authors of this study analyzed how wildfires and forest restoration, specifically thinning and prescribed fire being implemented in the French Meadows Project in the central Sierra Nevada, could impact streamflow, hydropower generation, and ecological flows for a threatened frog (Foothill yellow legged frogs). By…
Mark G. Anderson, Melissa Clark, Arlene P. Olivero, and D. Richard Cameron
In response to biodiversity loss, scientists have called for the protection of well-connected systems of protected areas covering 30 to 50% of the planet. However, as climate change drives shifts in species, conservation plans based on current biodiversity patterns will become less effective. The authors…
Michael C. Melnychuk, Charmane E. Ashbrook, Richard J. Bell, Lyall Bellquist, Kate Kauer, Jono R. Wilson, Ray Hilborn, Jay Odell
America’s fisheries provide nearly two million jobs and contribute $117 billion to the national GDP. Although state and territory fisheries account for 40% of the commercial value of U.S. marine fisheries overall, there has not been a nationwide synthesis of the performance of state/territory fisheries…
Christopher M. Free, Camila Vargas Poulsen, Lyall F. Bellquist, Sophia N. Wassermann, Kiva L. Oken
Commercial and recreational fisheries in California influence a long and dynamic history of coastal economies, cultural heritage, and marine ecosystem health. Fisheries-dependent data sources are critical for monitoring these trends over time, but even public data sources are often difficult to access. This slows down…
Lyall Bellquist, William J. Harford, Frank Hurd, Alexis Jackson, Jeremy D. Prince, Jan Freiwald, Anna Neumann, Jack Likins, Jono Wilson
Conventional fisheries management relies largely on professional sources of scientific data collection, typically from academic or government institutions. Development of community-led data sources (i.e., citizen/community science) has been slow, partially due to data quality concerns. Accelerating stressors to marine ecosystems and the dynamic nature of…
Nicholas C. Wegner, Elan J. Portner, Drew T. Nguyen, Lyall Bellquist, Andrew P. Nosal, Alena L. Pribyl, Kevin L. Stierhoff, Paul Fischer, Ken Franke, Russell D. Vetter, Philip A. Hastings, Brice X. Semmens, and John R. Hyde
Historical overfishing led to depletion of several groundfish species on the US west coast. Two of these species, Cowcod and Bocaccio, heavily influenced the expansion of groundfish regulations to rebuild multiple stocks. However, the effects of fishing-induced barotrauma, and the effectiveness of descending devices as…
Christopher M. Free, Sean C. Anderson, Elizabeth A. Hellmers, Barbara A. Muhling, Michael O. Navarro, Kate Richerson, Lauren A. Rogers, William H. Satterthwaite, Andrew R. Thompson, Jenn M. Burt, Steven D. Gaines, Kristin N. Marshall, J. Wilson White, Lyall F. Bellquist
As symptoms of climate change, extreme environmental events (e.g., marine heatwaves) now represent the greatest global threat to the oceans, causing profound ecosystem and socioeconomic impacts. The recent marine heatwave on the North America west coast was the largest ever recorded, but the extent of…
