Oak Woodland Monitoring — Abstract of Paper


Monitoring Conservation Success in a Large Oak Woodland Landscape
Rich Reiner,¹ Emma Underwood,² and John-O Niles³


Monitoring is essential in understanding the success or failure of a conservation project and provides the information needed to conduct adaptive management. Although there is a large body of literature on monitoring design, it fails to provide sufficient information to practitioners on how to organize and apply monitoring when implementing landscape-scale conservation projects. We describe a decision framework currently being developed by the Nature Conservancy. It can be used to help set monitoring goals, prioritize monitoring efforts, and select monitoring metrics. Monitoring goals should be organized around at least three purposes. First, they should be closely tied to each specific conservation action and measure progress in implementing that activity. Second, monitoring should measure the impact the strategy has on abating its targeted threat. Third, the measures should test and validate the assumptions made regarding how the natural community functions. We provide examples of how these three types of monitoring are being applied to a large blue oak woodland landscape in the Lassen Foothills of Northern California.