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Melissa Pitkin

Implementing Climate-Smart Restoration along California's Central Coast
This case study project is on the Upper Pajaro River, which crosses a 9,000-acre natural floodplain in the Central Coast. A portion of the riparian corridor within the floodplain is highly degraded due to intensive agricultural land use that has diminished its wildlife value and severed habitat connectivity. If restored, the corridor would connect 2 million acres of core habitat in adjacent uplands and link exceptionally rich natural communities in three climatically diverse coastal mountain ranges. This project developed a suite of climate-smart restoration practices in the Central Coast Ecoregion and pilot those practices on the Upper Pajaro River as a case study. Project goals are to: 1) Establish native riparian...
Students, teachers, and community members are key to implementing climate-smart restoration. Involving the community, through students, teachers, and families, has been a successful model for the past 15 years of Point Blue’s Students and Teachers Restoring A Watershed Program (STRAW).The following curriculum was designed and implemented with the help of 34 teachers from San Benito, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz counties. The four-lesson program involves three classroom sessions and one restoration day where students are actually doing the professional habitat restoration, working side-by-side with the staff from the STRAW Program.We welcome you to use our curriculum and materials as a model to do climate-smart restoration...
Thanks to the generous support of the California Landscape Conservation Cooperative,Point Blue Conservation Science, The Nature Conservancy, and the Elkhorn Slough CoastalTraining Program were able to develop a suite of climate-smart restoration practices in theCentral Coast Ecoregion, pilot those practices on the Upper Pajaro River, and shareknowledge gained and developed with the local community as well as with the broaderrestoration community in California.This report provides high level results of our work with links to the products developed.
Workshop GoalThis workshop aimed to broaden knowledge about supporting riparian restoration projects that use the principles of climate-smart restoration.Workshop DescriptionThe workshop consisted of a presentation by Point Blue on a set of principles designed to guide restoration planning to incorporate anticipated climate change. Following, we shared case studies where recent funding mechanisms have facilitated climate considered restoration design, and discuss some of barriers our practitioners face when attempting to fund and implement climate considered restoration projects. Through a facilitated discussion, we discussed together possible solutions.
A major challenge with communicating potential climate change impacts to general audiences is that many people have difficulty understanding how projected changes in temperature and precipitation affect the climate they are accustomed to and their lives in general. Climate analogs are an alternative tool that can be used to communicate potential climate change impacts by comparing locations with similar climates to illustrate changes that models project. The approach works by comparing the future climate at a location of interest to the historic climate of all locations (Figure 1). We identify the location with the most similar historic climate (analog site) to the future climate at the location of interest. The...
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