2023 Schedule – Pacific Time

In this session, the Hawai'i Land Trust will share its experience in running organized camping programs at two of its preserves for more than ten years and how it utilizes the camping opportunities to serve the local community and connect those individuals to the stewardship of the land. Hawai'i Land Trust staff will also review their software systems and processes for managing the camping program reservation system.

The worlds of land protection and watershed management often function in parallel despite their many areas of overlap. This session will explore three key questions that can facilitate development of best practices for forest protection for water quality and potentially increase eligibility of land protection for the millions of dollars in water quality funding available annually: how can land protection help achieve watershed management goals?; which lands within a watershed are most important for protecting water quality?; and how do you quantify the water quality outcomes of land protection? The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Open Space Institute (OSI) have worked to integrate land protection within watershed-based initiatives, for example through EPA’s Healthy Watersheds Program and OSI’s work through the Delaware River Watershed Initiative (DRWI). Through this work, EPA and OSI have identified the need for compiling best practice standards for integrating land protection in watershed-based initiatives aimed at achieving water quality goals. EPA and OSI will briefly highlight insights from research and case studies, which will serve as discussion prompts for participants to share their experiences. We anticipate this session serving as a critical starting point for land trusts and partners to provide grounded, practical input to inform future work to establish best practice standards for integrating land protection in water quality work. The session will provide time for participants to share their experience and ideas for advancing best practices related to the questions above. Note: this session will not address landscapes with severe water shortages/drought.

Learn about Midcoast Conservancy's 30x30 Geospatial Analysis to identify the lands within our service area that are of high priority for protection based on habitat value, connectivity potential and parcel size. Based on the tenets of conservation biology, this analysis, that uses geospatial analysis and least cost path analysis, enables Midcoast Conservancy staff to take a "proactive" approach to land protection as opposed to the traditional "reactive" approach of waiting for opportunities to present themselves. Based on our results for the parameters outlined above, we can identify and score parcels for a variety of attributes: size, quality and connectivity. With this data, we can now overlay parcel maps and actively approach landowners in these areas to develop to educate them and offer conservation options to them that suit their situation. We will also be using this to educate the municipalities in our service areas to inform their conservation strategies as they develop and update their comprehensive plans for the communities. Lastly, most funders that are looking to support land conservation want to see well thought out strategies before providing funds to support acquisition. Our 30x30 Geospatial Analysis is the science-based tool that will provide that information. We also designed our methodology so that it is easily replicable and can be shared with land trusts around Maine and across the USWe hope that others will adopt this method to increase the effectiveness of their land protection and 30x30 efforts.

Mediterranean ecosystems are found in only five places on earth: California, Mediterranean Europe (of course!), Chile, Australia and South Africa. These habitats also have a bit of everything —fertile soils that make them agricultural breadbaskets, temperate climates and beautiful landscapes where many people want to live and work, and biological diversity, with an unusual number of endemic plants. This makes them both global biodiversity hotspots and both rare and gravely threatened by unsustainable agriculture, forestry and commercial and residential real estate. In this panel, we'll hear from four experts who are at the forefront of efforts to protect Mediterranean habitats in California, Chile, Europe and Australia. We'll learn about the challenges they face, especially from the growing climate-change-driven impacts of wildfires and drought. Their approaches include innovative, resilience-based landscape and watershed management and land use planning, working landscape conservation easements, new private land protection agreements created outside the United States and more. The session will be of interest to Rally attendees who work in or want to learn more about Mediterranean habitats, and to practitioners conserving challenging, populated and ecologically significant landscapes.

The program will highlight innovative partnerships to restore water for climate resiliency, habitat and communities. Water is often an overlooked component of land trust work. As we reach ecological tipping points, it is clear that we need to act holistically across landscapes to restore resilient ecosystems. Recognizing the unique opportunities to restore water as part of land conservation, land trusts are leveraging new partnerships to integrate water into acquisition and stewardship projects. The program will highlight projects touching on Streamflow Restoration, Drinking Water Protection, Improved Water Quality and Wet Meadow Restoration. Land conservation can provide opportunities to restore streamflows through the protection of water rights associated with the property as illustrated by the partnership between Deschutes Land Trust and Deschutes River Conservancy to improve water quantity in Whychus Creek. Land conservation can be an important tool to protect the quality and reliability of community drinking water sources. This program will highlight The Conservation Fund’s partnership with the coastal community of Port Orford to conserve land within its drinking watershed. Land conservation and stewardship provides opportunities to improve water quality. The Wetlands Conservancy’s work as part of the Tualatin Basin Beaver Strategy provides an example of collaborating across sectors to create beaver coexistence strategies to improve both water quality and quantity. In Southern Oregon, working lands easements with Oregon Agricultural Trust help ranchers continue traditional irrigation management practices that sustain ranching communities and provide important wildlife habitat through wet meadow restoration with Ducks Unlimited.

Welcome to the Pacific Northwest (PNW)! Hop on the turtle train and learn about the journey of private and public lands, turtles and invasive species (both plants and animals). Friends of the Columbia Gorge Land Trust, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, United States Fish and Widlife Service (USFWS), and PNW Ecoservices come together to share the story of the imperiled Washington State-listed Western pond turtle and controlling invasive species to improve habitat at a land trust preserve and adjacent US Forest Service land. Himalayan blackberry and the American bullfrog have wreaked havoc for this turtle and presenters will discuss control techniques and timing as well as lessons learned. Learn about cross-boundary stewardship work, how volunteers have been engaged, the status of pond turtles in WA State and how partnerships have been critical to the success of this project including the procurement of funding from the USFWS Partners For Fish and Wildlife Program to support his work.

Land trusts are increasingly in contact with landowners through conservation transactions that touch on or include water and water rights. At the same time, few land trusts have the experience or in-house capacity to engage with water. This panel will showcase western regional water transactions and instream flow transfers, including conservation strategy, permitting, funding, partners and "lessons learned." Presenters will highlight tools and showcase transactions which include water rights: sale, lease, and/or donation, valuations, as well as forbearance agreements and instream transfers pursuant to state law.

The Backyard Habitat Certification Program (BHCP), co-managed by Columbia Land Trust and Portland Audubon, began as a small neighborhood pilot project to protect and enhance land trust properties by motivating adjacent private property owners to remove invasive weeds and naturescape with native plants. Fifteen years and 10,000 properties later, it has gained widespread recognition as an invaluable tool to engage new urban/suburban audiences in stewardship of their own yards and community spaces, while connecting them to broader conservation initiatives. Through this program, participating people and properties are enhancing essential habitat corridors, creating a more permeable landscape for wildlife, directly addressing human/wildlife conflicts that bring injured animals to Portland Audubon’s Wildlife Care Center and developing life-long connections between these tangible actions and broader organizational goals (membership, land/water stewardship, community engagement, climate change resilience, advocacy, etc.). This inspiring and interactive session will encompass our program’s journey, demonstrate why we think this work is critical to the future of conservation and provide session participants a facilitated opportunity to nurture and share ideas for launching, or further developing, their own urban conservation programs.

If you have publicly accessible trails on your protected lands but want some help managing those, this is the presentation for you! We will review the basics of trail design, building and maintenance and review what issues and concerns to be on the lookout for should you have to contract out for the trail work. We'll also review running a volunteer trail program in case you want to develop your own.

The California chapter of The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the Land Trust Alliance partnered to create a two-year grant program for land trusts to access remote sensing technologies for monitoring. This program was based on the TNC’s experience with implementing remote monitoring in California and in chapters nation-wide. Each land trust and TNC Chapter submitted return on investment data that showed a similar spread of experiences and results. Come learn how land trusts and TNC Chapters of different sizes, with land holdings across the continental United States, implemented remote monitoring, found cost and time savings, created new policies and procedures, reduced risk to staff and conservation values and expanded their uses of the technology beyond monitoring. The presenters will discuss unique use cases that address the challenges and solutions that TNC Chapters and land trusts found over a two-year time period.

In July 2021, the Bootleg megafire burned across south-central Oregon, including 12,000 acres of The Nature Conservancy’s Sycan Marsh Preserve. For over two decades, Sycan has been a center for learning about how to safely restore the natural role of fire in our dry forests through ecological thinning and controlled burning with numerous tribal, academic and public agency partners. This session will introduce to the Conservancy’s Sycan Marsh Preserve as well as our partnerships and treatments to conserve biodiversity and restore the inherent resiliency of these dry forest and marshland ecosystems. We will dive into the story of the Bootleg megafire and the results from our partnership with the University of Washington to evaluate the effectiveness of pre-wildfire treatments. Excitingly, preliminary results support the direct observations of our frontline fire personnel during Bootleg and indicate that, even under extreme fire weather conditions, wildfire severity was moderated in areas that had received controlled burning, either in combination with ecological thinning or alone, prior to the Bootleg Fire. Treatments to reduce fuels also allowed firefighters more and safer options to conduct effective fire suppression efforts. These hopeful results are relevant to land trusts and public land managers across the West and anyone who cares about conserving the resilience and biodiversity of our western forests in an era of fire.

The Traditional Harvest Project represents a unique partnership between the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe (UMUT), Montezuma Land Conservancy (MLC) and Trees, Water and People (TWP) focused on improving Tribal access to culturally significant plants on and off Tribal lands. With the land base of the the Núchíú (Ute People) of the UMUT reduced to 600,000 acres of Reservation lands, traditional access for cultural harvest has been greatly impacted resulting in the overharvest of Tribal lands. Many plants collected for traditional use are becoming scarce and hard for the Tribal community to find or access. The reason behind this is two-fold: habitat degradation has reduced the capacity of native plant communities to naturally regenerate traditionally harvested species, and harvesting the same plants year after year from the same areas has led to local overharvest. On UMUT lands, landscape degradation is exacerbated by climate change and changes in river hydrology due to upstream water diversions. Now it is more important than ever to restore habitat, increase access, engage youth and share the stories and knowledge of elders to strengthen cultural connection. Join us to learn more about the development of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe Traditional Harvest Plan, TWP’s work in Tribal lands restoration and storytelling, MLC’s role in supporting access to privately conserved lands alongside landowner partners and strategies for authentic community engagement and relationship building. This project exists at the nexus of Indigenous knowledge, innovative private lands conservation strategy and intergenerational knowledge sharing across cultures.

The Sierra Nevada region in northern California is critically important for California’s water supply and wildlife habitat. Of special significance to the Sierra are it’s montane meadows. This rare but important ecosystem is in urgent need of conservation to protect and restore their vital ecological services, including groundwater recharge, carbon storage, water quality and habitat for threatened and endangered species. This session will highlight the Mountain Meadows Conservation Project, a two phase innovative climate-smart effort that is resulting in the permanent protection and restoration of a significant portion of the largest wet meadow in the northern Sierra Nevada. Located in the headwaters of the North Fork of the Feather River, a critical source of water for drinking, agricultural uses and power production in service of 27 million people, this project includes two working cattle ranches which together support approximately 2,500 acres of meadow and riparian habitat, where four bioregions intersect producing an ecologically rich landscape that supports an abundance of species. With its massive extent, location and hydrologic significance, a protected and enhanced meadow system here is prime to become one of the most ecologically important places for birds, other wildlife and people in the Sierra Nevada. Through a partnership of the Feather River and Trust, the Trust for Public Land, Point Blue, Plumas Corporation and Sierra Pacific Industries, the innovative and collaborative efforts here will serve as a model and catalyst demonstrating how ranching, habitat, water resource management and community engagement can better align to create a climate resilient landscape.