Across the Pacific Northwest, from Mendocino County,California to Vancouver Island, British Columbia, dozens of partners are working to protect and restore prairie-oak habitats and implement recovery actions for species listed under the United States’ Endangered Species Act (ESA) and Canada’s Species at Risk Act (SARA). For many species,population and habitat objectives based on science quantify the magnitude of work needed. Although the required investments are substantial, and available funding remains far short of levels needed to achieve objectives, public and private funding is beginning to flow into conservation efforts across the region.
What we need now is a shared vision and overarching framework to coordinate conservation actions and investments across geographic and institutional boundaries and the silos created by narrowly focused missions and mandates.Without a common framework, we risk duplication of efforts and inefficient allocation of scarce conservation resources to meet our goals. We also risk failure.
To attract investment, we are presenting our strategies in the form of a conservation business plan. Conservation business plans present clear strategies, outline the resources necessary to meet conservation goals, and create accountability by defining measurable outcomes.This conservation business plan is intended to showcase our vision for healthy and abundant populations of native prairie-oak plants and animals within the context of human need sand a changing climate. The business plan demonstrates our collective capacity to respond to real-world demand for products and services around prairie-oak conservation and generate outcomes that are important to people as well as to a naturally functioning ecosystem.
Companion Document: Prairie, Oaks, and People – Profile Projects.
