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Birds, Wildlife
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The C3JV strives to advance conservation projects that are explicit in their multi-benefit objectives to protect biodiversity and advance economic viability.

STORIED
Landscape.

Acknowledging a

California’s Central Coast is an abundant place, rich in biodiversity, working lands, and vibrant communities. Over time, this landscape has supported people, agriculture, wildlife, and local economies through a remarkable diversity of habitats, waterways, grasslands, oak woodlands, wetlands, and coastal systems.

Today, many of the species and habitats that define the Central Coast are under increasing pressure. Wildlife declines are not the result of any single cause, but of many overlapping changes across the landscape: the historic exploitation of species, the conversion and fragmentation of habitat, growing development pressure, altered waterways, and working landscapes that have too often been asked to produce more without enough investment in the ecological systems that sustain them.

Long-term conservation on the Central Coast requires practical partnerships that strengthen agriculture, support local communities, protect water and habitat, and recover the species that depend on healthy lands and rivers. By working with landowners, agencies, producers, and communities, we can rebuild the ecological function of this region while sustaining the people and economies rooted here.

ECOSYSTEMS BIODIVERSITY.

The C3JV works to advance conservation efforts within six habitat systems that each have unique assemblages of species, pressures acting on them, and people engaged in their stewardship. Key avian focal species are then used as indicators to help the Joint Venture monitor and assess our conservation impact over time within each habitat system. Our six conservation targets include: 1) Oaks and Prairies; 2) Scrub and Chaparral; 3) Riparian and Freshwater Wetlands; 4) Conifer and Mixed Hardwoods; 5) Urban and Intensive Agriculture, and 6) Coastal and Marine Systems.

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Oaks and Prairies

Oaks and Prairies represent the most extensive vegetation community in the C3JV region, consisting of nearly 50% of the JV’s terrestrial geography. In response to physical factors such as aspect, slope, soil, proximity to the coast, and frequency of fog, Central Coast Oak and Prairie communities range from closed canopy coast live oak woodlands such as found along the north-facing and mesic slopes of the Coast Range, to open, nearly treeless annual grasslands in interior valleys such as the upper Salinas and San Juan watersheds. Most of the Oaks and Prairies in the region are managed as rangeland with approximately 83% of the target privately owned. This influences both the challenges and opportunities of building partnerships across a diverse array of users in Oaks and Prairies.

Riparian and Freshwater Wetlands

Though composing a small fraction of the C3JV Region, riparian and freshwater wetland systems of the Central Coast can be characterized as perhaps the most important habitat for landbirds relative to their extent in the JV region. Oak, scrub, conifer, agricultural and coastal dwelling birds all occur in riparian systems, and in fact many are dependent upon riparian habitats for at least part of their annual lifecycles. While riparian systems intersect all other terrestrial conservation targets, by elevating riparian and freshwater wetlands as a conservation target itself, attention is called to both the importance and significant conservation need these habitats command. As critical breeding and wintering grounds, migration traps, and corridors for dispersal, the C3JV has an important role to play in ensuring efforts in this significant reach of the Pacific Flyway continue to restore, enhance and protect these most essential habitats.

Scrub and Chaparral

Comprising nearly one third of the terrestrial landscape of the C3JV, shrublands are an iconic, largely endemic, and often misrepresented, perhaps even neglected, habitat assemblage responsible for much of California’s floristic and faunal diversity. Shrub communities flourish under varying moisture, temperature, nutrient and disturbance gradients within the region’s Mediterranean climatic regime, resulting in a mosaic of numerous scrub and chaparral compositions.

Conifer and Mixed Hardwood

The Central Coast is especially rich in conifer and mixed hardwood diversity, owing to significant endemism, the intersection of several ecoregions, and an abundance of microhabitats influenced by aspect, soils and summer fog. Paleoendemics, including coastal redwood, Monterey pine and Santa Lucia fir, once existed across much larger ranges but are now highly restricted to climatic conditions of the past. Conversely, numerous cypress species represent neoendemics having adapted to unique micro-sites in isolation from each other, resulting in relatively recent speciation events. The Central Coast hosts the meeting place of the cool forests of northern California, dominated by coastal redwood and Douglas fir, the drier southern and rocky mountainous interior of yellow pines (Ponderosa and Jeffrey), as well as the far western extent of pinyon-juniper woodlands. While equating to less than 10% of the C3JV region, the diversity of habitats represented by conifer and mixed hardwood forests and woodlands greatly enhances the region’s avian diversity.

Urban and Intensive Agriculture

Known as the salad bowl of the nation, the Central Coast hosts some of the most productive soils in the world. Together with urban-dominated landscapes, intensive agriculture (as opposed to extensive rangelands and vineyards) composes nearly 10 percent of the C3JV region, concentrated significantly along the Salinas River valley, but also in the Pajaro, Santa Maria, Cuyama, Santa Ynez watersheds.

Coastal and Pelagic

Perhaps the most defining landscape of the C3JV geography, the approximately 500 mile coastline includes some of California's most iconic viewscapes. Though relatively undeveloped relative to portions of the South Coast and Bay area, sandy beaches, grandeur cliffs, productive bays and good surf supports a vibrant tourism economy. Amidst the activity, critical shorebird wintering habitats, beach-nesting specialists, and a cacophony of seabirds crowd the coast and pelagic waters of the Central Coast.

WORKING
LANDS
ECONOMY.

The concept of the ecological engineer is perhaps useful in understanding the role humans play in shaping the habitats of the Central Coast. Our conservation targets are interwoven with local economic compatibility goals acknowledgment that healthy economic and ecological systems are inextricably linked.

Supporting Local Management

Morro Rock has long served as a defining landmark of the Central Coast. Strengthening locally led stewardship, access, and resource management is central to C3JV’s mission of ensuring that conservation decisions are grounded in local knowledge, local priorities, and long-term care for the land.

ESSENTIAL
ELEMENTS.

Collaborative Conservation, which is to say conservation by working together for collective solutions, requires a set of core principles, values and attributes that enable synergistic outcomes. The C3JV and partners see these most essential elements as ingredients that foster the leavening of a successful Joint Venture, and ultimately, the enabling of a vision of the Central Coast where economies and wildlife thrive.

Plan

Monitor

Engage

Planning is rightfully the starting point of most conservation efforts, but given the complex and urgent pressures we aim to tackle, how can we approach this fundamental need in a way that best achieves our goals? The C3JV has embraced the Conservation Standards approach, which is an ever-evolving method designed to systematically build learning into a living plan that is nimble to failures, unforeseen challenges, and diverse goals. Our forthcoming C3JV Implementation Plan will be the first rendition of a Standards approach, ready to be shared, tested and improved.

Joint Ventures are tasked with stewarding migratory birds and the habitats on which they depend. This most fundamental task requires a robust monitoring network to track trends over time, measure success and failure, adapt our approaches, and re-evaluate priorities. The C3JV is committed to working with partners to build upon existing monitoring efforts (ie. MAPS Stations), integrate new technologies (ie. MOTUS), and foster opportunities for undergraduate and graduate research with on-the-ground, applied projects that inform C3JV conservation actions while training the next generation of stewards.

Successful collaboratives are built of partnerships of a range of perspectives. Through engagement that extends beyond traditional actors, new synergies may be waiting, paradigms can shift, and conservation efforts may lurch forward. The C3JV is eager to explore novel partnerships, and seeks to strengthen our capacity to engage with new audiences.

Protect, Restore, Enhance

Perhaps the bread and butter of conservation, the C3JV is eager to support, spearhead, champion, cheerlead, and celebrate efforts that protect key land and seascapes, restore degraded ecosystems, and enhance the functioning of habitats for birds and other wildlife. Our goal is to strengthen the compatible efforts happening across the Central Coast as we repair and recover habitats and ecosystems that support the richness of life definitive of the place we call home.

Multiple-benefit

While the C3JV might view landscapes through a 'bird lens', advancing the recovery of migratory birds within the Central Coast and across the Pacific Flyway, the principle of multiple-benefit conservation is a guiding tenant of our approach, both in terms of beyond avifauna and across taxa, but also in the recognition of the importance projects play to working lands and rural economies. While win-win approaches can be challenging to achieve, the C3JV seeks to engage in efforts that "simultaneously benefit local economies, enhance ecological function, and improve habitat quality for fish and wildlife."

Scale

The recovery of birds experiencing long-term declines, the revitalization of anadromous fishes responsible for the health of our watersheds, the reconciliation of past harms between Indigenous and non-indigenous peoples; the solutions will be made at scale, across political constructs, and beyond the fence. The C3JV seeks to maintain a vision of the forest between the trees, advancing conservation a the landscape scale, while acknowledging each tree holds a story, each river-mile a step closer to the headwaters.