Take action!

Realizing the Conservation Lands Network vision is not the job for one person.  It takes all of us, close partnerships, sustainable funding, and heaps of creativity.  We invite you to join us with whatever assets you have – coalition-building skills, talents for forward-thinking plans, financial resources, or policy-making capabilities – to keep the Bay Area as one of the most special places on Earth.

1. Include everyone.  The Conservation Lands Network can be used by anyone with a computer who wants to help protect open space, wildlife, and ways of life.  Incorporate Explorer into your planning efforts or funding proposals.  Use the GIS data in your plans.  And connect with the Bay Area Open Space Council to stay in the loop. 2. Create incentives. In these cash-strapped budgetary times, create incentives for ranchers, farmers, and forestland owners that will stabilize land tenure and improve the habitat and the economic viability of working lands. 3. Continue funding what already works.  Find ways to provide consistent sources of private and public funding for land conservation and stewardship similar to the San Francisco Bay Area Conservancy Program, Williamson Act, private landowner incentive programs, conservation easements, mitigation monies, and the Land and Water Conservation Fund. 4. Encourage an era of New Neighboring.  Use the Conservation Lands Network to help neighbors partner with neighbors by linking management actions across property lines.   Help connections grow informally and formally in ways that promote community-based conservation. 5. Integrate into public plans.   Concentrate development in places that keep essential habitat out of harm’s way by including the Conservation Lands Network in General Plans, the Sustainable Community Strategy and Habitat Conservation Plans, as well as other land use, watershed and transportation planning efforts. 6. Freshwater first!  Protect every drop by preserving and restoring sensitive watershed lands and streams.  Promote active, ongoing stewardship and protection.  These areas will provide both movement corridors and refuge for plants and animals confronting a changing climate. 7. Adapt and evolve.  Help public and private landowners create long-term, adaptive management plans that will build on and sustain the network. Create new initiatives within the Conservation Lands Network, such as the upcoming Bay Area Critical Linkages Project, that strengthen and deepen ongoing conservation opportunities. 8. Think Big. Connect More.  Find creative ways to protect essential lands and water such as efforts like the Living Landscape Initiative and the America’s Great Outdoors initiative.

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The Conservation Lands Network has launched and will change how conservation in the Bay Area is done.  In concert with Bay Nature’s article Big Plans, Wild Lands, we will be profiling the Network, the accompanying tools and how you can take action on our blog this week.  Learn more at BayAreaLands.organd tell your friends.

We thank the funders of the Upland Habitat Goals Project and invite you to join them in supporting regional, science-based conservation planning.  Click here to contribute.