Page 20 - Sierra Meadows Strategy

Meadow Protection and Enjoyment
• Meadows are protected from development where important ecological resources are threatened.
• Meadows and streams support recreational uses of such as shing, hunting, bird and butter y watching and
wild ower viewing.
• Natural resource management institutions and practitioners manage human actions and natural resources that affect meadows in a coordinated, pro-active way that supports and maintains fully functional watershed and meadow processes and physical conditions. Interactions among institutions, including implementation of regulations intended to protect natural resources, are coordinated, transparent, effective and ef cient to protect and also support timely restoration and/or enhancement actions.
• Land owners and land managers across the Strategy Area
are engaged in meadow management and restoration
and have easy access to the most recent information and resources—including sources of nancial support—and expertise in meadow management, restoration, and restoration effectiveness monitoring.
Sierra Meadows Strategy Goals
The goals are broadly de ned for the Strategy Area. These can be further re ned and speci ed for watershed and project scale planning. These eight goals are intended to guide development of ner scale SMART objectives that are described in Section V. An assumption underlying these goals is that the Strategy will lead to an increase in the pace, scale and ef cacy of meadow restoration, management and protection.
In addition, these goals:
• Are intentionally broad and use correspondingly broad metrics which can be assessed at the landscape level and re ned for a project. These goals will lend themselves to region wide assessments of the role and advancement of meadow restoration;
• Will be updated approximately every two years;
• Are not listed in order of importance;
• Are inter-related, so that achieving one will require achieving others;
• Address not just restoration, but also continued management and protection of meadows;
• Will require implementation of three Approaches (detailed in Section V):
- On-the-ground restoration and conservation management to achieve and maintain desired
conditions; and increase the pace of meadow restoration;
- Enhancement of regulatory and institutional coordination; and
- Increased capacity and partnership opportunities.
A solid foundation of partnerships among land managers, advocacy groups, restoration practitioners, land trusts, and research institutions exists, and these partnerships have been critical to realizing the restoration of approximately 10,000 acres of montane meadow to date85. This Strategy aligns with
• the State Water Action Plan18,
• the Sierra Nevada Watershed Improvement Program
Regional Strategy19,
• the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation Sierra Meadows
Restoration Business Plan20; and
• the USDA Forest Service Region 5 Ecological Restoration
Leadership intent85.
California’s State Water Action Plan calls for 10,000 acres of meadows to be restored18. US Forest Service Region 5 Ecological Restoration Leadership Intent86 calls for restoration of 50 percent of accessible degraded meadows in the next 15 to 20 years.
The Watershed Improvement Program supports restoring and protecting the health of Sierra Forests and acknowledges that signi cant effort will be required to restore meadows, since their health is critical to stream condition as well as downstream water quality19. The NFWF Sierra Meadow Business Plan called for 20,000 acres of meadows restored prior to 201420.
To increase the pace and scale of meadow restoration in the Strategy Area, we chose an acreage target that is higher than that of the State Water Action Plan and the NFWF Sierra Meadow Restoration Business Plan, and less than that of the estimated 90,000 degraded meadow acres in the Strategy Area14. Thus, the Strategy sets forth an “all-lands and all-hands” approach with an overarching goal of restoring and/or protecting 30,000 acres on all lands in the Sierra Nevada and proposes to re ne this acreage through further analysis over time. The overarching goal was based on increasing the pace, scale, and ef cacy of meadow restoration. The Sierra Meadows Partnership chose
an acreage higher than the State Water Action Plan and the NFWF Sierra Meadow Restoration Business Plan to support signi cant increases in pace, scale and ef cacy over current effort levels, recognizing both that this target is challenging but feasible, and the urgent need to achieve increased meadow function. Achievement of this goal will result in the restoration
or conservation of one third of the currently degraded 90,000 acres of meadows in the Sierra Nevada, the Modoc Plateau,
the Southern Cascades and Warner Mountains, which comprise the “Strategy Area”14. The Partnership chose a fteen year time window based on several factors. The target of restoration of 10,000 acres in ve years set forth in the State Water Action would only partly meet the overall need for restoration. The Partnership believes that the goal of restoring approximately one third of the degraded meadows can be achieved within 15 years (circa 2030) and that this critical piece of improving the resilience of the Sierra Nevada and southern cascades to our changing climate must be accomplished within the 15-year timeframe.
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