As a conservation organization stewarding over 3,880 acres of wildlands, we’re excited to share with you a bit of our hard work in 2024. This year, we almost doubled the size of our land management crew, welcoming Eric Reyes and Robert Rahm to our field team. With increased capacity, we can do more, and there is so much to do!

Preservation of open space is more than just restricting development. Ventura Land Trust owns about 3,700 acres of coastal sage scrub (CSS), a geographically limited and unique arrangement of plants, animals, weather, and soil, that is collectively considered one of the most imperiled ecosystems in the country with only about 10% of its original distribution left on earth. A whole suite of species in our area are endemic to CSS, meaning they don’t live anywhere else but in this imperiled system.

Take, for example, the beautiful California brittlebush (Encelia californica) that is fairly common on our preserves. You may not have known that it is restricted to southern California CSS and just slightly interior, dipping down into northern Baja. In areas where it is the dominant shrub (>30% relative cover), called California brittlebush alliance, it is ranked S3 in global and state rarity, meaning it is considered vulnerable and at moderate risk of extirpation due to restricted range, few populations, recent and widespread declines, or being under threat. Check out its clustered occurrences in the Calflora map below.

Many other species are even more limited in range within CSS. Like coastal cholla (Cylindropuntia prolifera), one of a few coastal cactus species—yes, coastal cactus! The coolest! The populations on our Harmon and Mariano preserves are among the northernmost in its range.

Even more restricted, coastal buckwheat (Eriogonum cinereum), is a California endemic and can only be found in a very limited area of CSS on the southern California coast. In our area, we have only found this species at Mariano and have not observed it at Harmon.

These are a few of so many examples of why the wildlands on our preserves are so special and important to protect. How do we know all this? We’re glad you asked!

Learning about biological diversity and ecological function on our properties is key to conservation management. In the last year we have radically expanded our science-based ecological monitoring efforts, completing floristic surveys of our two largest properties and cataloguing over 350 plant species, including sensitive taxa. We installed 20 herpetofauna sampling areas with over 100 coverboards to monitor reptiles and amphibians. We’ve worked with volunteers to manage half a dozen field cameras to track wildlife, partnered with volunteers and consultants to perform over 100 avian surveys, started multi-year invertebrate sampling projects, surveyed and measured 225 tagged coast live oaks, and completed our first lichen inventory, revealing 60 species at Harmon alone. We completed an ecological history assessment of Harmon and are in the process of completing one for Mariano, providing an important baseline to understand management history, composition of vegetation alliances, soils mapping, and the distribution and abundance of sensitive resources like oaks and riparian systems. We’ve collected high resolution aerial imagery throughout our properties to create a visual baseline, and have installed over 1,000 permanent photo points across our seven properties to qualitatively document biological resources and public access areas in order to track changes over time.

Further, we have collaborated with and facilitated research partnerships with multiple institutions to both learn from and share the dynamic ecology of our properties with the broader scientific community, including the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, UC Santa Barbara, the Xerces Society, US Fish and Wildlife Service, UC Riverside, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and UC Berkeley.

Deepening our understanding of the ecological complexity of our preserves is the only way to be effective conservation stewards. As we learn, we do, learn, repeat. We know through our own work and through the work of the broader scientific community that invasive species are the most significant threat to biological diversity and ecological function, second only to habitat loss. Invasive species do more than just outcompete and displace native plants and animals--they change the way natural systems work. In our area, invasive species are directly responsible for increasing fire frequency and intensity, changing the way river systems flow and respond to flooding, modifying the chemical and biological make up of the soil that influences what can grow, increasing erosion on steep slopes from shallow root systems, utilizing and transpiring much more water than native species and precluding groundwater recharge, among many other impacts. These impacts affect biodiversity and ecosystem function, but are also a significant threat to public safety and our economy.

We take these threats seriously and have invested in a skilled field team that can identify, manage, and monitor the biological resources of our properties to not just preserve, but to enhance their natural resources. Our team has been working tirelessly to reduce invasive plant cover in over 15 miles of linear corridors across our preserves. We’ve targeted localized populations of highly invasive species like fennel (Foeniculum vulgare), tree tobacco (Nicotiana glauca), stinkwort (Dittrichia graveolens) fountain grass (Pennisetum setaceum), Saharan mustard (Brassica tournefortii), and artichoke thistle (Cynara cardunculus), to name just a few. We’ve treated tamarisk (Tamarix spp.) in over 2 miles of our riparian corridors. On our river properties we’ve surveyed and addressed flood dispersed arundo (Arundo donax) resprouts across 30 acres of rugged riparian habitat. We reduced fuel loads across 3.5 miles of our wildland urban interface, including highly flammable invasive annual grasses, mustards, and thistles. And we’ve partnered with our deeply devoted and generous WHIP volunteer crew who have donated 2,000 hours with 130 individuals to reduce invasive plant cover in lower Harmon canyon. With the increased rainfall from last winter, we saw native plants rapidly fill the weedy gaps we treated and begin to passively restore these degraded areas.

There is so much we can do to both learn from and enhance the wildlands we are responsible for, and we’re deeply grateful for your support on the journey. Cheers to celebrating the wild nature on our doorstep and to helping it flourish!

Yours in nature,

Laura Pavliscak

Conservation Director