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.

Wildlands

Nearly half of California is protected in some land status that prevents most kinds of intensive…>>

Harvested Landscapes

A third of California is privately-owned forestland, woodland or grassland. From redwood forests on…>>

Cultivated Landscapes

California is the leading agricultural state in the country and it’s agriculture generates…>>

Urban Areas and Infrastructure

With California’s population on track to reach 50 million people, the demand for energy,…>>

Science in Action

Terrestrial | Planning | Technology

Wildfire and Communities

How can land protection and restoration help protect communities from wildfire?

Terrestrial | Marine | Science

TNC and FEMA

How do we increase climate resilience in ways that work for people and nature?

2002 | Terrestrial | Science | Publications & Reports

Lack of an urban edge effect on reproduction in a fragmentation-sensitive sparrow

Scott A. Morrison, Douglas T. Bolger

Fragmentation-sensitive species – those that tend to disappear when their habitat is fragmented – pose particular challenges for conservation, in part because fragmentation ushers in such…

2000 | Terrestrial | Science | Publications & Reports

Arthropods in urban habitat fragments in southern California: area, age and edge effects

Douglas T. Bolger, Andrew V. Suarez, Kevin R. Crooks, Scott A. Morrison, Ted J. Case

Habitat fragmentation ushers in a wide array of ecological changes, and understanding the drivers and impacts of those changes is critical for conservation management. This study examines an often…