Michael Hamilton University of California James San Jacinto Mountains Reserve Post Office Box 1775, Idyllwild, CA 92549-1775 951-659-3811 mhamilton@jamesreserve.edu
Michael Allen UC Riverside Center for Conservation Biology 209 University Laboratory Building 3401 Watkins Drive Riverside, CA 92521 (909) 787-6314 mallen@ucr.edu
Brent Mishler UC Berkeley 1001 Valley Life Sciences Building, # 2465 Berkeley, CA 94720-2465 bmishler@berkeley.edu
Jim Richards University of California at Davis One Shields Avenue Davis, CA 95616 jhrichards@ucdavis.edu
We propose a two-fold strategy for the PSW domain. The first is the development of the California Coastal Core (C3). Secondly, this core site will be the hub for a broader network of sites in California called CalEON that provides an infrastructure for study of gradients representing the entire domain and State. The C3 core consists of a 2,600 km2 triangle overlapping the Central Coast Man and the Biosphere (MAB) reserve, now the Golden Gate MAB. The site is dominated by oak woodlands, chaparral, both annual and perennial grasslands, and wetlands. Interspersed is a large rangeland and agricultural area with an expanding urban matrix. The core site is an idyllic California setting as described by Steinbeck, London, and many others over the past two centuries. The core site consists of a headquarters located at the Blue Oak Ranch Reserve (BOR), a new reserve designed and built specifically to NEON research questions and infrastructure specifications. It is connected to the two nearby reserves both with long research histories, the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve (JRBP), located 55 km northwest of BOR. This site has an especially rich history of research on endangered species, global climate change and ecosystem processes, with over 400 peer-reviewed publications, 170 dissertations, and 480 student papers. Completing the core triangle is the UC Hastings Natural History Reserve (HNHR), located 90 km southwest of BOR, and 100 km south of JRBP. The HNHR started in 1937, with over 500 research publications, including an especially rich history of research in biodiversity, including a transect of land use disturbance from relict perennial grasslands, grazed exotic annual grasslands, to intensive agriculture in the Salinas Valley (Steenwerth et al., 2003). Between these reserves is a network of agricultural, urban, and suburban areas that allow us to clearly characterize the impacts of human perturbations on wildland ecosystems.
I.1 State the name(s) of the NEON domain represented. Pacific Southwest Domain I.2 State the geographic coordinates (latitude/longitude) and size (acres). Headquarters: BOR: 37° 22’ 55.70”” N by 121° 44’ 11.95”” W. Combined C3 area is 7,000 acres (~3, 000 hectares), broken down by BOR (3,300 acres), JRBP (1,100 acreas) and HNHR (2,500 acres) See attached ArcView shape files as well as Google Earth KML entire core: BOR, JBRP, HNHR, approximately 2,600 km2 I.3 Unique site characteristics that make it an ideal NEON site for that domain. 1) Our proposed Headquarters, BOR, provides 3,300 acres of research area within the Central Coast Mountains Diablo Range, Mount Hamilton vicinity - a region of moderate Mediterranean climate, predominantly blue oak and valley oak woodlands, perennial grasslands, abundant aquatic elements (lakes, ponds, streams), diverse native flora and fauna, and a relatively simple history of land uses (primarily grazing). BOR is surrounded by more than 180,000 acres of permanently protected parks and open space, and lies entirely within a TNC conservation project, which has an ultimate goal of placing 500,000 acres into permanent conservation status. JRBP adds another 1,189 acres of the same basic vegetation. While it does not have adequate facilities for on-site living, it has an outstanding research history, particularly in the area of global change, crucial to the NEON goals. HNRH adds another 2,500 acres, and is at the center for biological diversity within the continental US. It has housing for about 25 researchers. All sites have internet and year-round road access, and are accessible to 3 major airports and 1 smaller one, San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland, and Monterey.
2) BOR is currently in ownership by a private Conservation Trust, and by April 2007 the site becomes owned in fee title by the Regents of the University of California, and will be added to the Natural Reserve System (UC-NRS) as its 36th Reserve. An agreement is now in place between the University and TNC (who holds the conservation easement for the property) to allow NEON-compatible research activities and infrastructure. BOR will have a $2.5 million endowment, University annual operating funds, and one-time facility matching contributions from a recently passed California State revenue bond (Proposition 84), which in total will support permanent staffing and operations, a $5 million start-up budget to develop resident staff and researcher housing, a 30-bed dormitory, class/meeting rooms, lab and engineering spaces, power and communication infrastructure, a data center, and additional elements as specified by NEON. The site offers year-round road access, close proximity to airports, universities, and services required by NEON for a core wildland site. Unlike existing sites with other dedicated priority uses, BOR will be designed, organized, and built as a Headquarters for the Core Site for NEON. HNHR is a UC-NRS reserve managed by UC Berkeley and the NRS. JRBP is a field research station owned and managed for ecological research by Stanford University. The latter two are long-time member stations of the Organization of Biological Field Stations (OBFS).
3) The site straddles the rough latitudinal mid-point of California, embedded within a 1.2 million acre wildland region that separates the urbanized Santa Clara or “Silicon Valley” and the City of San Jose to the west, from the agricultural landscape of the Central Valley to the east that includes both extensive (livestock grazing) and intensive (high-input vegetable) agriculture, for which management is expected to change markedly due to climate change (Cavagnaro et al., 2005). Within this region, east-west transects offers opportunities to measure natural and anthropogenic ecological and environmental gradients that are highly representative of the PSW domain as a whole, and most importantly the core site location serves as a central node connecting to larger gradients across PSWEON, with access to protected sites for experiments and NEON instrumentation, across the length and width of the PSW domain. We compared potential core sites using “within domain representativeness models,” (Hargrove and Hoffman, 2006) against the domain as a whole. C3 and its surrounding region scored consistently left of the mean for all values, indicating that the site is not only ecologically representative of the domain, but more so than nearly all other potential core sites that were evaluated. See Fig. 1 for location of BOR and relationship to the climate space represented by the California Floristic Province.