California Wildland Survey
There are 25 million acres of private wildlands in California. These forest and rangelands include hardwood forest, conifer woodland, oak woodland, grassland, and shrub (chaparral) vegetation types producing important ecosystem services such as clean air and water, wildlife habitat, and scenic landscapes. They also include an estimated 5 million homes on 5 million acres of land. Wildland landowners will play a critical role in determining the future of California’s wildlife habitat and open space, and yet, very little is known about them.
To better understand and serve California’s current and new wildland owners this research will:
- Develop a wildland owner database for the state of California
- Survey of a sample of landowners
The goal of this research is to better understand landowners and their relationship with the land they own, in order to help develop outreach approaches, and to understand patterns and drivers of land use change and land management. The survey will ask landowners about their reasons for owning the land and how long they have owned it, what their information needs are, and about their willingness to invest in sustainable practices and land uses. Results from this survey will be used to better understand factors affecting land use change in California’s private wildlands as well as to inform future outreach to landowners by Cooperative Extension.
Shasta Ferranto is working on this with Lynn Huntsinger, Christy Getz, and many others.