The San Francisco Bay Area's Santa Cruz Mountains have been recognized as a biodiversity hotspot, while being situated in one of the most populous and rapidly developing areas in the United States. Over the past several decades, there has been a substantial investment of public and private funds in land conservation, resulting in the permanent protection of many priority areas. Despite progress and continued efforts to secure a protected and connected conservation lands network, the ecosystems of the Santa Cruz Mountains face a serious threat of isolation from the adjacent Diablo and Gabilan Ranges.
At a regional scale, three tenuous and vulnerable habitat chokepoints have been identified through wildlife connectivity assessments. The landscapes that connect the southern part of the Santa Cruz Mountains and neighboring ranges feature a network of major roads and highways, and there is a lack of available information to identify (1) where habitat connectivity is currently supported and should be maintained; (2) locations where maintenance and/or upgrades to existing transportation infrastructure could increase landscape permeability and reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions; and (3) locations where new wildlife passage infrastructure may be needed to remediate barriers to wildlife passage and reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions.
To address this need, Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) and Pathways for Wildlife have developed a landscape-scale study utilizing systematic camera monitoring and roadkill surveys. This investment will yield a detailed, comprehensive, and objective perspective on the current situation. Once completed, the findings will be made available to transportation agencies, conservation groups, and numerous other stakeholders who are working in the area, in order to inform future work and develop strategies for project implementation.
This study is ongoing and data will be collected through 2020. Please join key members of the project team to discuss ideas for analyses that would support a process to develop an inventory of where wildlife are and are not able to safely cross the State Highway System. Discussions will focus on (1) how to prioritize locations where wildlife connectivity improvements may be needed and (2) the identification of opportunities to improve connectivity (e.g. ranging low-hanging fruit, such as installing directional fencing, to more expensive fixes, such as culvert upgrades).
We hope to learn from the insights, perspectives, and experiences of others regarding effective strategies for landscape-scale, interagency collaboration to implement wildlife connectivity enhancements.