Reports

All-hands, all-lands approach to increasing the pace, scale, and efficacy of meadow restoration and protection throughout the Greater Sierra Nevada. Articulates three overarching strategy approaches, 1) Restore and/or protect meadows to achieve desired conditions; 2) Enhance regulatory and institutional funding capacity and coordination; 3) Increase and diversify institutional and partnership capacity for meadow restoration and/or protection in the greater Sierra.

This report shares the results of a broadly collaborative effort to assess and prioritize meadows in the Pine Creek Basin for restoration. The purpose of this Pine Creek Meadow Assessment report is twofold. First, it provides condition data and explains why the Pine Creek CRMP chose the first set of meadows as the top priority for restoration. Second, it provides a basis and identifies next steps for partners to pursue in restoring meadows in the watershed.

Between 2013 and 2015, American Rivers and Trout Unlimited were funded by NFWF to use the meadow scorecard in the Walker basin to guide investment and accelerate the pace of restoration. We identified five priority meadows and established the Walker Working Group to pursue restoration of these five sites. The purpose of this Walker Basin Meadows Condition Report is twofold. First, it provides condition data and explains why the Walker Working Group chose the first set of meadows as the top priority for restoration.

This report brings together recent survey results from state and federal agencies and other groups, and provide an updated range map and population estimate for Willow Flycatcher in the Sierra Nevada.

Meadows of the Golden Trout Wilderness (GTW) are an extremely valuable component of the landscape, providing numerous benefits to society. In 2012, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation funded a partnership between CalTrout, Trout Unlimited, and American Rivers to evaluate meadow resources in the GTW and prioritize meadows for restoration. We hope the information we provide here will help partners and the US Forest Service work together to increase the pace and scale of meadow restoration in the GTW.

In this project, we sought to identify putative climate change refugia and connectivity between meadows across the Sierra Nevada and to use data on persistence, stability, and genetic diversity of mammal populations to validate these hypotheses. We addressed California Landscape Conservation Cooperative priorities of scale by analyzing across the Sierra Nevada. We involved state and federal natural resource managers throughout the project; some are already beginning to incorporate results.

Natural Range of Variation (NRV) assessments (essentially equivalent to Historical Range of Variation [HRV] assessments) provide baseline information on ecosystem conditions (composition, structure, and function) that can be compared to current conditions to develop an idea of trend over time and an idea of the level of departure of altered ecosystems from their “natural” state (Morgan et al. 1984, Manley et al. 1995, Landres et al. 1999, Wiens et al. 2012; see Methods).

The Center for Watershed Sciences authored a technical report, "Montane Meadows in the Sierra Nevada: Changing Hydroclimatic Conditions and Concepts for Vulnerability Assessment" to better prepare the meadows community for ecosystem monitoring and restoration planning under future hydroclimatic conditions.

In 2010, the USDA Forest Service Pacific Southwest Region (USFS PSW) received a grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, with matching funds from the State Department of Water Resources, to conduct an assessment of potential water resource benefits of meadow restoration on the 10 national forests distributed across much of the Sierra Nevada. Subsequently, USFS PSW contracted with the Viers Laboratory in the Information Center for the Environment at UC Davis to conduct a field verification of two important objectives of the overall project, described below.

This reports describes Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center (CSERC) continued monitoring or meadow condition and the degree of grazing utilization at more than 60 mountain meadows on the Stanislaus National Forest.