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In the Bay Area this past year, the effects of climate change came into full focus as we navigated our way through flooding, record-setting heat waves, firestorms, and an unseasonably warm, dry winter. Based on climate projections for the future, we can only expect more of these patterns and extreme events in the years to come. This raises many questions for open space managers. In a rapidly changing world, how do we prepare the lands we manage to withstand the effects of climate change by building landscape resilience? How do we know if we are protecting, managing, and monitoring the Bay Area’s open spaces appropriately? While managing for ecological resilience has in many ways guided our work up to this point, how do we, as a region, incorporate the latest climate change science into on-the-ground decisions that can add up to long-term resilience? And who are our partners?

Join us at our Gathering on Thursday, March 15, 2018 for a discussion about the challenges and opportunities of incorporating landscape resilience into land conservation practice. In many ways, this is a continuation of a conversation started at the Open Space Conference last year where we heard from panelists about what landscape resilience means and what land conservation looks like through a resilience lens. During the March Gathering, we’ll spend more time on what we are calling the “Resilience Big Five”.

• Climate Change Science: Predictions, conceptual frameworks, analysis, and monitoring
• Climate-smart Land Protection: Safeguarding corridors, refugia, hydrologic connections, carbon-rich sites
• Climate-smart Land Management: Restoring hydrologic regimes, reducing fuels, conserving soil moisture, adaptive management, empowering private landowners
• Communicating Climate with the Public: Addressing concerns, communicating solutions, leading by example
• Integrated Climate Strategies: Integrated built and nature-based solutions, creating new partnerships, developing inclusive frameworks

Speakers:

• Tom Robinson, Moderator, Director of Conservation, Science, and Innovation, Bay Area Open Space Council
• Robin Grossinger, Senior Scientist, San Francisco Estuary Institute
• Hayley Edmunston, ‎Climate Resiliency Fellow, ‎Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District
• Marcel Wilson, Design Director and Principal, Bionic (Resilient By Design Participant)
• Tosha Comendant, Conservation Science Manager, Pepperwood Preserve
• Fernando Cázares, California Manager – Climate-Smart Cities, Trust for Public Land

We’ll be using #OSCResilience to talk about the event on social. Please share this event with any of your colleagues who might like to attend.