PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS: Robert Fisher and Barbara Kus, San Diego Field Station.

BACKGROUND AND JUSTIFICATION: Southern California is a region characterized by both unparalleled natural biodiversity, and an enormous human population whose continued growth and expansion threatens many native species and habitats. As a result, this region has more endangered and threatened species than any other area in the continental United States, and once extensive natural communities, many of which are unique to the area, have been reduced to mere remnants. To say that managing for the co-existence of wildlife and humans in this region has been difficult understates the incredible challenge of conserving natural areas and the species reliant upon them in this rapidly urbanizing area. Historically, wildlife protection has taken the form of single-species management as provided for under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Growing recognition that the single-species approach is not justifiable on either ecological or socioeconomic grounds has promoted a shift towards multi-species and habitat-based planning in the form of Habitat Conservation Plans (HCP's), legal agreements which afford protection under the ESA to multiple species and/or habitats. The most recent generation of HCP's emerged with the incorporation into California law of the Natural Communities Conservation Planning (NCCP) program in 1991. The pilot project of this ambitious program focuses on protection of coastal sage scrub communities within a 6,000-square-mile planning area spanning five southern California counties. It is this planning effort that is the subject of our investigation.

The NCCP planning area is divided into 11 subregions, some of which are further– subdivided into subareas. Within each subregion, local governments develop conservation plans for lands within the program, including identification of reserve boundaries, and strategies for monitoring specific species and ecological processes within the reserves. Currently, several subregions have established reserves and are now moving ahead with development of monitoring plans. These plans, which ultimately require approval from regulatory agencies (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, California Department of Fish and Game), identify strategies for two types of monitoring:

(1) compliance: monitoring, or tracking the status of listedœspecies (e.g. California Gnatcatcher, Polioptila californica) with regard to requirements–of the ESA, and

(2) early warning monitoring of species and/or processes selected–for their ability to reveal the existence of unfavorable conditions that would trigger management intervention.

Although conservation plans are generated separately for each subregion, it is the intent of the NCCP program that collectively they will achieve the goal of maintaining plant and animal populations, and their habitats, at acceptable levels region-wide. This will depend not only on the configuration and management of individual reserves, but also on the connectivity between reserves and the extent to which they create a functional network. Although progress is being made in developing subregional monitoring plans, what is currently lacking is a comprehensive regional plan that will assess whether the reserve system as a whole is functioning effectively and achieving its objectives. The lack of such a regional plan is of great scientific concern in that without one, it is not possible to evaluate the effectiveness of the NCCP program, a critical issue in that the program is being promoted by some as a model for habitat conservation planning for the rest of the country. Additional concerns stem from the fact that subregional plans are proceeding without a regional framework identifying monitoring needs, data standardization, and other considerations that should be addressed in order to maximize the contribution of subregional monitoring to accomplishment of regional monitoring objectives. Further concerns are rooted in the emphasis of subregional plans on compliance monitoring, with less attention devoted to early warning monitoring. Moreover, there is growing recognition that a regional plan is necessary to evaluate processes that transcend the local scale and are properties of reserves at the regional level, such as dispersal and movement between reserves.

We propose to develop a regional ecological monitoring plan for the NCCP through collaboration with regulatory agencies, resource managers, university scientists, and other technical advisory committees. Specifically, we seek to develop a plan that focuses attention of the resource management agencies on the conservation conditions of the region as a whole. Recognizing that ecological monitoring is more than a simple exercise in tracking a particular feature of interest, our goal is to design a plan that will detect changes in ecological conditions that exceed acceptable limits, identify the specific threats affecting covered species and habitats, and help prioritize management and research needs in response to what is learned from the monitoring data.

OBJECTIVES:

1. Develop a comprehensive plan for regional monitoring, in conjunction with ongoing technical advisory committees, that will assess conservation conditions across the entire NCCP planning landscape.

2. Evaluate the extent to which existing subregional and other monitoring programs contribute to regional monitoring objectives, and identify the need for any additional monitoring effort necessary to implement the regional strategy.

As preparation for a future phase of this study in which we propose to evaluate and interpret data collected by the regional monitoring plan, we have identified a third objective:

3. Assess the regional connectivity of the reserve and its capacity to maintain viable populations of fragmentation-sensitive species, focusing on large carnivores.

STUDY AREA: This project focuses on the 6,000-square-mile planning area of the NCCP coastal sage scrub program within the South Coast Ecoregion of California This will be a laboratory study, and will be based primarily on an analysis of documents from throughout southern California. 

The regional monitoring plan will strive to identify a range of alternatives that address the stated objectives. We intend to produce a scientifically defensible program that will inform managers with sufficient reliability and statistical rigor. Thresholds of unacceptable change will be established that will enable managers to determine when "adaptive management" is appropriate. We recognize that the monitoring program needs to be designed to provide alternatives for managers to choose among, with an indication of the relative value and power of each alternative to achieve the stated objectives.