DUDEK - Conserving Habitat in Urban Areas

Natural Resources Management

Conserving Essential Habitat in Large, Rapidly Urbanizing Areas
Southern California’s Western Riverside County is one of the fastest growing regions in the United States – and home to 32 state and federally-listed endangered species living in dwindling county open space.

In a mammoth effort to address this critical problem while satisfying landowners and conservationists alike, the county developed the Riverside County Integrated Project (RCIP), a framework designed to steer development in an environmentally-friendly direction while maintaining economic growth.

At its heart is something new: a creative system of flexible conservation guideposts that attempts to assemble a large, managed preserve over the course of 25 years – just one parcel at a time.

Preventing a Repeat of History
The RCIP was born out of experience. During a real-estate boom in the late 1980s, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) placed a small grassland rodent called the Stephen’s Kangaroo Rat (SKR) on the federal endangered species list. Because Western Riverside County was one of only a few SKR habitats, construction in the area immediately halted; landowners and taxpayers wound up contributing $42 million to the preservation of a single species.

As development picked up in the late 1990s, the county, whose population is expected to double in the next 15 years, knew a species-by-species, project-by-project approach to land-use planning would be disastrous. Furthermore, a piecemeal, fragmented collection of protected parcels wouldn’t do any good for genetic flow, ecosystem health, or wildlife mobility.

On the Offensive
The RCIP, which brings land use, transportation, and habitat planning together in one coordinated planning effort, was the county’s pre-emptive strike. The conservation prong, the Western Riverside County Multiple Species Habitat Conservation Plan (MSHCP), became the largest plan of its kind. As stakeholders and planners began discussing the details of the project, it became clear that traditional approaches to habitat conservation would not work.

“Ownership is extremely fragmented with thousands of individual parcels within the planning area and no major landowners,” said Joe Monaco, senior environmental project manager for Dudek, the primary authors of the MSHCP.

With no major blocks of land available to form a hard-line preserve planners had to craft a more flexible way to add 153,000 acres of privately-owned land to the county’s 347,000 acres of public land.

Putting It Together
After input from a broad spectrum of stakeholders and direction from the county board of supervisors, Dudek biologists and environmental planners proposed a criteria-based plan using individual cells.

The strategy combines data on covered species, habitats, and land uses and merges them with conservation biology principles such as maintaining large habitat cores and linkages and reducing internal fragmentation. Multiple 160-acre cells make up area plans, which together create cores and linkages. Each cell has certain criteria connected to it; when a landowner seeks a permit to develop his land, the county examines all the associated information and determines how the developer can work in a way that best fits the larger conservation goals, instead of mounting an entirely separate process for each developer and each species.

“It’s tools, not rules,” said June Collins, head of Dudek’s environmental division. “We have a general description of what the overall preserve should look like and a process for assembling the preserve in accordance with the criteria presented in the plan.”

The Path Ahead
The flexibility of the criteria-based approach, the certainty that future state and federal obligations would be met with the MSHCP, and the fact that the cost would be distributed among development fees, the state, and the federal government won over landowners. In 2003 the county Board of Supervisors approved the MSHCP, and in 2004 the USFWS and the CDFG issued permits for the plan, transferring responsibility for compliance with the Endangered Species Act to the local governments. The plan won the 2004 National Environmental Excellence Award from the National Association of Environmental Professionals, and Dudek is now involved in two major transportation projects that will test the plan’s real-world abilities.

“This is a long-term preserve assembly process,” said Collins. “Now the rubber is hitting the road in terms of implementation, both with respect to preserve assembly and preserve management and monitoring. A large-scale criteria-based plan such as this hasn’t been done before.”

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