Projects
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TBC3 – Terrestrial Biodiversity & Climate Change Collaborative
Pepperwood’s Terrestrial Biodiversity and Climate Change Collaborative (TBC3) is a vibrant collective of university, non-profit and government experts focused on bringing the best available science to inform climate adaptation strategies for natural resources in California’s Coast Ranges. TBC3 is co-chaired by Pepperwood and UC Berkeley. View the Fact Sheet (pdf)
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Forest Monitoring
The forest monitoring study at Pepperwood is creating a vital baseline for the health of Northern California forests that will be valuable to researchers for decades to come. In the short term, the data we’re collecting is helping us understand the effects of extreme weather events like California’s historic drought. Pepperwood
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Bay Area BioAtlas
The distribution of the Bay Area’s unique plants and animals are already shifting in response to land use and climate change. As a baseline for monitoring these changes, the Bay Area BioAtlas seeks to build reserve-level Species Guides of where these plants and animals persist and where they are absent.
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Pepperwood Vegetation Mapping & Monitoring
TBC3 has initiated what we anticipate will be a long-term field based measurement system to detect and evaluate habitats in transition at Pepperwood Preserve. The initial project goals consist of (1) Vegetation map development at Pepperwood as a baseline to evaluate habitat structure and vegetation distributions, (2) Establishment of permanent
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Conservation planning
TBC3 is working to incorporate climate changes into the Conservation Lands Network (CLN) for the San Francisco Bay Area. The CLN was designed as a land acquisition guide for biodiversity conservation and recommendations were based on detailed vegetation cover analysis and the targeting of locations with specific species populations and
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Fog Mapping & Modeling
Summertime fog is a major modifier of the climatic condition along the California coast and has significant effects on human and ecological coastal communities. Marine stratocumulus and fog alter evapotranspiration rates, provide substantial moisture for coastal plants, modify stream temperatures, and strongly affect the distribution of plants and animals in
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Climate change impacts on Bay Area vegetation
The distribution of major vegetation types in the Bay Area captures the strong climatic gradients from coastal to inland areas, the variable topography of valleys and mountain ranges, and the impact of more than two centuries of logging, grazing, agriculture and urbanization. As the dominant vegetation creates the template for
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High resolution climate layers
Hydrologic and climatic variables from 1900 thru 2100 at the spatial resolution of a 270-m grid are available from the Basin Characterization Model (BCM). To access BCM data for the San Francisco Bay Area for four different climate scenarios please visit the Conservation Lands Network Explorer Tool, and click on
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Stream Flow Enhancement
Thanks to funding from California’s Wildlife Conservation Board, Pepperwood is conducting a streamflow enhancement project. We are testing the hypothesis that forest thinning may increase water yield by using a paired watershed approach. We will compare the amount of water in the air, in the ground, and in our streams