The Project hosted a half-day meeting in Sacramento to highlight preliminary results from its yearlong outreach effort and discuss next steps. The meeting featured remarks by Resources Secretary Nichols, former Assemblywomen Virginia Strom-Martin, and Jack Dangermond, the founder of ESRI, a highly regarded geographic information systems software development company. The event showcased a gallery of California Legacy Project maps developed during the past year and recognized those state agencies and departments who were responsible for helping put the spatial information gallery together.

Users of the Conservation Atlas can view data from any part of the State, zooming into specific areas of interest. Moreover, users can put the Conservation Atlas to work for their own planning and projects by creating and printing custom maps and downloading data sets to their own computers. The 45 data layers in the first phase of the Atlas are publicly available, statewide data layers developed and maintained by a variety of public agencies and private organizations. The data are not parcel specific, but usable for large scale landscape planning. Each data set comes with a description that highlights its source, date, appropriate use, and other information.

Assistant Resources Secretary Madelyn Glickfeld, who directs the Legacy Project, reminded attendees that the Legacy effort was designed to look strategically across landscapes and jurisdictions to ensure that the state’s conservation investments will meet the long terms needs of a diverse state like California. She unveiled some of the preliminary information gathered at the workshops and noted it will help answer some questions the Legacy Project was designed to address.

Conservation Criteria As an example, one of the tasks at Legacy workshops was to identify conservation factors (“criteria”) that can help guide the state’s conservation investments in habitat, recreation, and working landscapes. Although this was not a consensus process and there are limits to the applicability of these criteria, such information can be useful in helping to validate existing decision making elements and identify important data gaps.

For the subjects of terrestrial biodiversity and aquatic biodiversity, the Legacy Project found a good deal of commonality between regions, with a number of specific criteria ranking consistently at the top.

Important investment factors for aquatic biodiversity are water quality, quantity, and flow regimes; habitat linkages; and high quality riparian habitat. Important investment factors for terrestrial biodiversity are large intact natural areas; functional ecological processes; and habitat linkages.

Conservation Strategies The Legacy Project also conducted hour-long, small group sessions to identify specific conservation strategies, with a goal to identify “win-win” approaches. The nine workshops produced hundreds of strategies. Again, this was not a consensus process, but produced a good deal of discussion about efforts that are working or could be implemented, such as:

Strategies and Local Economic Sustainability
• Conserve private working lands
• Consider economic implications in rural areas
• Utilize “smart growth” tools
• Continue to use conservation acquisitions
• Funding activities, or
• Develop, compile, and disseminate data

Some Unique Strategies
• Create information clearinghouse for grant applicants (North Coast)
• Provide incentives for water reuse on farms (Central Valley)
• Coordinate conservation planning around military lands (South Coast)
• Indemnify landowners who provide recreational access on easement lands from liability (Bay Area)

In addition to all the information and data generated at the workshops, Glickfeld said she noticed that a recurring workshop theme was that participants wanted to increase regional collaboration and capacity-building and boost strategic conservation planning so it can be tailored to specific areas. After all, as the Project learned in its statewide outreach effort, “one size doesn’t fit all.” The next steps for the Legacy Project include efforts that support more regional and localized approaches.

Later this year, a summary report about the Legacy workshops will be released. This publication, plus individual workshop reports and extensive data from each of the regional gatherings, can be found on the Legacy website at www.legacy.ca.gov. For additional information, contact the Legacy Outreach Coordinator, Charlie Casey, at charlie.casey@resources.ca.gov.