Department of Botany and Plant Sciences
University of California Riverside
Conservation & Restoration
An important goal to maintain and protect biodiversity is to minimize threats to communities in their natural states and a key goal for conservation management is to implement activities that enhance the resilience of native communities and local biodiversity. These activities often must be implemented while trying to optimize other ecosystem services. We are working with land managers to guide implementation of conservation grazing strategies to enhance native diversity and to optimize other management activities within California grasslands and shrublands.
Evaluating Management Potential within the Angeles National Forest
Prioritization decisions are coming to the fore-front for federal agencies like the United States Forest Service as they are forced to budget a finite amount of resources to an increasing area of forest and wildlands that are recovering from wildfires. Our work in collaboration with the USFS is designed to conduct a robust assessment of post-fire recovery in the Angeles National Forest to determine the regeneration capacity across this spatially complex landscape
Evaluating outplanting success in chaparral ecosystems
Restoration plantings are done in a variety of settings within our national forests, but success is quite variable depending on the species and timing of the planting. We are partnering with the USFS and a local non-profit TreePeople to evaluate outplanting success of oaks and conifer species. Additionally we’re investigating the use of early regeneration traits to guide chaparral restoration post-wildfire.