In California, a day’s drive can take a visitor from record-setting desert heat to glaciated peaks to temperate rainforests with the world’s tallest trees. This astounding climatic and landscape diversity has helped create a biodiversity hotspot. California is also an economic hotspot – the 6th largest economy in the world – and is home to nearly 40 million people. The demand for land for new development and farms, along with accelerating climate change, puts tremendous stress on ecosystems, and the benefits they provide.
The state’s legacy of conservation has created a network of natural and working lands that benefit people by supplying clean water, capturing carbon, and directly contributing to the state’s economic and cultural vitality through recreation, tourism, and agricultural production. Conservancy scientists work across the spectrum of ecosystem types and human land uses, to advance conservation goals that also contribute to the well-being of people in those places.
Bruce Markman, H. Scott Butterfield, Janet Franklin, Lloyd Coulter, Moses Katkowski, and Dan Sousa
Residual dry matter has been widely used to monitor grazing impacts across conservation grazing lands for more than 75 years, largely done with time-intensive, expensive, and hard-to-reproduce…
Golet G.H., Kristen E. Dybala, Joeseph G. Silvera, Adam Henderson, Jennifer Isola, David H. Wright, Ron Melcer Jr., and Danika Tsao.
Lowland alluvial rivers are rich in biodiversity, yet many are highly degraded and no longer support robust natural communities. Over the past few decades, Bank Swallows, which depend upon these…
A.D. Binley, J.O. Hanson, O.J. Robinson, G.H. Golet, J.R. Bennett
Monitoring biodiversity is critical for informing conservation but can also deplete resources available for management actions if the time and money available are limited. Freely available…
Michael J Clifford, Peter Gower, Tanya Anderson, Jaina Moan, Mickey Hazelwood, Sophie S Parker, Laurel Saito
Dramatic changes to the transportation and energy sectors are required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and meet the goal of keeping global average temperatures from rising. The authors discuss how…
Carrie A. Schloss, D. Richard Cameron, Bradley Franklin, Christoph Nolte, Scott A. Morrison
In response to biodiversity declines worldwide, over 190 nations committed to protect 30% of their lands and waters by 2030 . As these jurisdictions move from planning to implementation, we propose a…
Erin. E. Conlisk, Gregory H. Golet, Mark D. Reynolds, Nathan Elliot. and Matthew E. Reiter
Shorebirds are the second fastest declining group of birds in North America. To reverse this trend, The Nature Conservancy has been implementing BirdReturns, a habitat incentive program that pays…
William T. Bean, H. Scott Butterfield, Jeanette K. Howard, Thomas J. Batter
In this paper, the authors used a variety of habitat suitability modeling approaches to begin to understand where pronghorn may exist in the future in California under different climate change…
Lucy Genua, Brad Anderson, Meghan Bowen, Genelle Ives, Owen Liu, Thomas Paschos, H. Scott Butterfield, Kelly Easterday, Mark Reynolds, James H. Thorne
In this paper, the authors used historical vegetation data, from both aerial photographs and field transects, to assess the change in major vegetation types at the Dangermond Preserve over the last…
Michael J. Clifford, Sophie S. Parker, Laurel Saito, Brian S. Cohen, Naomi S. Fraga
Lithium batteries are important for the clean energy transition in the United States because they are used in electric vehicles and for grid power storage. However, lithium extraction may have impacts…
Nicholas A. Povak, Patricia N. Manley, Kristen N. Wilson
This study presents a methodology to integrate spatial assessments of current and future forest conditions to understand the potential to achieve desired conditions under climate change with ongoing…
Sophie S. Parker, Michael J. Clifford, Brian S. Cohen
To address climate change, the United States is incentivizing the production of electric vehicles containing domestically derived lithium batteries. Extracting this lithium may have environmental…
Michael Clifford, Sophie Parker, Matt Rader, Lydia Bailey, Naomi Fraga, Chris Hass, Estella Hernandez, Jan Kempf, Lois Merkler, Michael Swink
The Amargosa River supports one of the most outstanding suites of endemic and imperiled species in the world. In 2019, TNC acquired the Atwood Preserve in the river’s headwaters, the…
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…
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…
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,…
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…