Healthy riparian habitat along the Lower Mokelumne River. Photo credit: Matt Hoffman
Climate change, invasive species, and habitat loss continue to threaten the places that California’s diverse wildlife call home. Unfortunately, only limited resources exist for important restoration work, particularly along vital riparian corridors. Riparian ecosystems (the habitats that exist along rivers and streams) play a critical role in supporting both people and nature by supplying the vegetation buffers that protect rivers, creating wildlife habitat, slowing flood waters, and keeping water clean by reducing soil erosion.
The large number of environmentally beneficial projects needed to restore California’s rivers and streams calls for significant investment, which means stakeholders and landowners are faced with tough decisions about how best to spend their limited resources. Just like farmers considering the trade-offs of purchasing an expensive new tractor or other equipment and technologies to more efficiently grow their crops, conservation practitioners and landowners must weigh the cost-benefits of restoration in order to best allocate resources.
With this in mind, our latest work involves producing a high-level cost-benefit analysis of areas yet to be restored to riparian habitat along the Lower Mokelumne River. This assessment helps address an information gap identified by local stakeholders and can help stakeholders determine how to conduct outreach to landowners along the river, and how best to allocate funding for riparian restoration along the Lower Mokelumne River.
As industries, including agriculture, become more efficient, conservation must do the same. California wins when time and funds are used to get the biggest environmental bang for the buck.
Read more about our assessment to inform conservation planning along the Lower Mokelumne River.
Map of the Mokelumne River Watershed produced by EDF.