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Politics & Government

Santa Cruz County Conservation Blueprint

The Land Trust of Santa Cruz County releases assessment detailing the most pressing environmental and land-use issues in the county.

In mid-February, the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County released its Conservation Blueprint, the first all-encompassing assessment of its kind, detailing the status of the most pressing environmental and land-use issues in the county.

The 196-page document covers biodiversity, water resources, agriculture, ranch lands and parks and recreation areas, while further including recommendations for future actions to protect these areas.

More than 100 technical advisers, representing a broad cross section of the community, weighed in to produce the report.

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“There’d be meetings, and people would look around and say, ‘We’ve never been in the same room together,'” said Stephen Slade, Land Trust deputy director.

The conservation blueprint, which took two years to compile, brings together information that has never been available in the same document.

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“Until now, it was just scattered in so many different places,” said Betsy Herbert, an environmental analyst for the San Lorenzo Valley Water District, who served on the blueprint steering committee.

The Land Trust identified about 50,000 acres of target land for conservation to protect endangered species, watersheds and other important natural resources, Slade said.

However, that doesn’t mean all of the land needs to be protected from all human use.

“When you say protect 50,000 acres, you think ‘buy’ 50,000 acres,” Slade said. “That is not what we’re thinking—maybe only 10 or 15 percent of it will actually be purchased.”

Instead, the blueprint encourages finding incentives for individual landowners to conserve valuable land without having to give it up.

Such incentives could include the selling of easements, which may bar residential development but would allow landowners to still own their land, for example.

Another member of the steering committee, John Ricker, says this type of innovative recommendation is a strength of the blueprint.

“It's a good balance of protection and stewardship and maintenance of functioning, working lands,” he said.

Despite such helpful recommendations for conserving land, Ricker says, there's still a lot of work to be done.

“There’s a tremendous need for additional resources to implement the stewardship and the programs we need to really protect and manage the landscape,” he said.

Realizing that budgets are tight, the Land Trust included a section on “multi-benefit” areas—that is, places where conservation can have an impact on several fronts.

“These are areas where you could really leverage your conservation strategy,” Herbert said.

For example, just south of Capitola are ponds in Larkin Valley and Rio del Mar that support several threatened species, including the California tiger salamander, and the adjacent areas are a stopover for migrating monarch butterflies. The blueprint concludes that protecting the lands above the ponds will help maintain their water quality.

The blueprint also notes that the Forest of Nisene Marks State Park is one of the largest parcels of contiguous habitat in the county, as well as being an important recreation area.

Another priority for the Land Trust has been to anticipate future challenges to conserving land in Santa Cruz County, and Herbert points to the specter of climate change that looms on the horizon.

A myriad of effects could result from changing weather patterns, and Herbert says rainfall is of particular concern, because gauges might register the same annual totals, but they don't account for the type of rainfall, such as intense storms punctuated by longer dry periods.

“From a water manager’s point of view, that rainwater becomes much harder to capture,” Herbert said. “During big storms, a lot of the rain that falls ends up flowing into the ocean [and] evading absorption into the aquifers that supply the county’s drinking water.”

As the climate changes, water conservation and watershed protection will become more important, said Herbert, adding that the blueprint examines these issues.

While climate change and population growth are future challenges the blueprint’s authors can anticipate, Slade said there are sure to be other issues that will arise and that even the document in its current form is mutable.

To view the Land Trust's Conservation Blue Print, click here. Public input is encouraged and accepted through March 18.

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