Irvine Ranch Natural Landmark Project

The Irvine Ranch Natural Landmark is a collection of permanently protected wildlands and parks located near the Santa Ana Mountains in Southern California. It represents approximately 44,000 acres of land, much of which has been degraded by anthropological disturbances and fire. Managers are currently looking at how to target funding over the next 20 years to achieve the best possible results for restoration.

To date there has been little work on the systematic priorisation of restoration activities, so this project represented a relatively novel application of spatial conservation planning theory. We worked with Dr Jutta Burger, Dr Megan Lulow and Yi-Chin Fang at the Irvine Ranch Conservancy to formulate the restoration priorisation problem and develop a return on investment based approach for determining robust restoration priorities for a 20 year planning horizon. Problem complexities included a need to account for multiple objectives, time lags, logistical constraints, stochastic occurrences of fire and drought, connectivity and uncertain outcomes.

A snapshot of restoration priorities for the Ranch using a return-on-investment approach for the 20 year planning horizon

Outcomes from the project have included:

• A problem definition paper for prioritizing restoration activities (currently under review in ecological modeling)
• An application paper, detailing how we specifically applied our methodology to the Irvine Ranch Landmark case study
• Development of restoration prioritization software that will used by Ranch managers to implement and update restoration priorities by over the next 20 years.

Wilson, K.A. Lulow, M., Burger, and McBride M.F. In Press. Chapter 17-The Economics of Restoration. In D. Lamb, P. Madsen and J. Stanturf, editors. In Forest Landscape Restoration: Integrating Natural and Social Sciences. Accepted 12th January 2011.