NEWS
2024 Highlight: Spotlight Stewardship Illustrated
Every year, the Santa Cruz Mountains Stewardship Network offers Spotlight Stewardship, a course for community leaders to come out on to the land to see stewardship projects. This year, we were lucky to have Carlotta Cataldi, a graphic recorder, accompanying us on a few of the tours. The images below are some of her impressions of what she saw.
From a tour of Quiroste Valley with the Amah Mutsun Land Trust, State Parks, and the San Mateo Resource Conservation District.
From a tour of Quiroste Valley with the Amah Mutsun Land Trust, State Parks, and the San Mateo Resource Conservation District.
From a tour of Quiroste Valley with the Amah Mutsun Land Trust, State Parks, and the San Mateo Resource Conservation District.
From a tour of Scott Creek, with the Resource Conservation District of Santa Cruz County, Swanton Pacific Ranch, and Jim Robins.
From an introduction to the Santa Cruz Mountains Stewardship Network.
Fine Scale Vegetation Map
The Santa Cruz Mountains Stewardship Network is thrilled to announce that the Santa Cruz & Santa Clara Countywide Fine Scale Vegetation Map is complete and available at PacificVegMap.org.
Thanks to our fantastic team: Project Manager, Danny Franco, Technical Advisor, Kass Green, Tukman Geospatial, California Native Plant Society, NV5, and many others. And thanks to everyone who helped fund this project!
Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force
At the recent convening of the Governor’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force in Santa Cruz, CA, the SCMSN was very present. The Executive Directors of the San Mateo and Santa Cruz Resource Conservation Districts, Kellyx Nelson and Lisa Lurie, respectively, both facilitated panel discussions. Network Manager, Dylan Skybrook and Network members, Chris Spohrer, Santa Cruz District Superintendent for State Parks, Valentin Lopez, Chair of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band all participated on panels. They were joined by Steve Auten, now of Auten Resource Consulting, but formerly a member of the SCMSN when he was at Swanton Pacific Ranch. And, SCMSN members provided sites for field trips on the second day of the convening. Including at San Vicente Redwoods where the image above weas taken during demonstrations on techniques for addressing woody biomass.
Over and over, the conversation on various panels and on the field trips, referenced the need for collaboration and the value that the SCMSN provides in helping collaboration happen in the region.
SCMSN Fire and Forest Health Forum
The SCMSN held a Fire and Forest Health Forum on April 14, 2023 in which staff from SCMSN organizations who work on fire prevention and forest health projects came together to share information and create a map of fire and forest health projects in the region. This kind of event let’s people make connections with people with whom they can collaborate and learn new information about doing their work effectively. It also aids everyone’s understanding of how much fire and forest health work is happening in the region.
SCMSN Paper Published in Nature Sustainability
SCMSN Paper Published in Nature Sustainability
A Santa Cruz Mountains Stewardship Network team, including Nicole Heller, Kelly Chauvin, Tony Barnosky, and Network Manager, Dylan Skybrook, wrote a paper about the need to include stewardship when thinking about ecosystem health that was published in the journal Nature Sustainability. Here is a link to the paper.
Stanford University also wrote about the project.
Spotlight Stewardship 2022
The SCMSN once again offered Spotlight Stewardship, a course for community leaders to get out on the land to see stewardship projects up close and hear from the practitioners how they make decisions about how best to care for the Santa Cruz Mountains region. This year’s course visited San Bruno Mountain, San Vicente Redwoods, Quiroste Valley, Swanton Pacific Ranch, Scott Creek, the watershed around Pescadero, and the watershed around Los Gatos.
To participate in Spotlight Stewardship, get more information here.
Climate Change Adaptation in the Santa Cruz Mountains
It all begins with an idea.
The Santa Cruz Mountains Stewardship Network engaged Ecoadapt and Pepperwood Preserve’s TBC3 to help SCMSN members with climate change adaptation planning. Ecoadapt and TBC3 offered a series of workshops that resulted in vulnerability assessments and adaptation strategies for a number of species and habitats in the Santa Cruz Mountains. This information will help land managers make stewardship decisions as the climate continues to change. You can see the report and the assessments here. This project was funded by Sempervirens Fund and Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District.
Spotlight Stewardship: San Vicente Redwoods
On the last day of the Spotlight Stewardship course we visited San Vicente Redwoods. Participants were introduced to the property and the various stewardship issues associated with it by Dan Olstein from Peninsula Open Space Trust, Laura McLendon from Sempervirens Fund, Rich Sampson from Cal Fire, Chris Coburn from the Resource Conservation District of Santa Cruz County, Janet Webb from Big Creek Lumber, Val Lopez from the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, Mike Powers from the Bureau of Land Management, independent forester Nadia Hamey, and consultant Jim Robins.
Lunch time at San Vicente Redwoods.
Laura Mclendon from sempervirens fund explains the history of the property to the spotlight stewardship participants.
Val Lopez shares history of the Amah Mutsun in the region.
Spotlight Stewardship participant Loretta Moreno at San Vicente Creek.
Spotlight Stewardship
The Spotlight Stewardship program is designed to bring community leaders out on to the land to learn about land stewardship issues. We currently have a fantastic cohort of seventeen community leaders participating in the four-day program. On day one we visited Mindego Ranch, Midpeninsula Regional open Space Trust's property in Redwood City. On day two we visited the Pescadero watershed and looked at a stream restoration project done by the San Mateo Resource Conservation District. On day three we visited Land Trust of Santa Cruz County's Byrne Forest, as well as the privately-owned Estrada Ranch in Corralitos. Our last and final day we'll visit San Vicente Redwoods near Davenport.
The view from the top of Mindego Ranch. May 12th, 2017
Irina Kogan of the San Mateo Resource Conservation District highlights aspects of a stream restoration project in Pescadero. June 9th, 2017
Bob Berlage from Big Creek Lumber explains the finer points of forestry. August 4th, 2017
Lunch at Deer Camp at Estrada Ranch. August 4th, 2017
Santa Cruz Sentinel Writes About The Network
Check out the great article by the Santa Cruz Sentinel about the Network. The article makes a nice mention of our Spotlight Stewardship program.
Photo Dan Coyro.
Amah Mutsun Research
Check out the fascinating story of the research that one of our members, the Amah Mutsun Land Trust, has done that shows that the Amah Mutsun have been doing prescribed burns in the region for at least the last 1000 years.
From amahmutsun.org:
"Ten years ago, a group of researchers led by UC Berkeley Professor Kent Lightfoot came to the Amah Mutsun Tribal Council with a novel kind of proposal. They wanted to work with the Tribe and State Parks to begin a scientific project to learn more about the long term history of relationships between Native people and the natural world at Quiroste Valley, located near Año Nuevo Point in San Mateo County. A primary goal of the project was to investigate whether Native people used prescribed burning as a stewardship method to maintain open and productive landscapes long before the arrival of Spanish colonists.
The research project would bring together many different types of academic and scientific methods in a framework we call “integrative historical ecology.” Under this approach, researchers recognize that no single method or discipline can provide a complete picture of complex human-environment relationships. So we try to understand ways of life in the past using a diversity of perspectives that can include documentary histories, oral traditions, archaeology (the study of physical materials created and used by people in the past), ecology (how animal and plant communities function and interact), and paleo-ecology (how biotic communities were structured and functioned in the past)."
Read more at amahmutsun.org.
Photo by Chuck Striplen.