Appreciation, use, and management of biodiversity and ecosystem services in California's working landscapes.

"Working landscapes" is the concept of fostering effective ecosystem stewardship and conservation through active human presence and management and integrating livestock, crop, and timber production with the provision of a broad range of ecosystem services at the landscape scale. Based on a statewide survey of private landowners of "working" forests and rangelands in California, we investigated whether owners who are engaged in commercial livestock or timber production appreciate and manage biodiversity and ecosystem services on their land in different ways than purely residential owners. Both specific uses and management practices, as well as underlying attitudes and motivations toward biodiversity and ecosystem services, were assessed.

Expanding the table: the web as a tool for participatory adaptive management in California forests.

Participatory adaptive management is widely promoted as the new paradigm in public lands management. It is grounded in two underlying principles - that management experiments and diverse sources of information should be used to continually refine management in complex ecological systems, and that the public must be included throughout the adaptive management process. Access to scientific results and exchange of information is at the core of both of these principles.

Consider the source: the impact of media and authority in outreach to private forest and rangeland owners.

Over half of the United States is privately owned. Improving environmental sustainability requires that the scientific and management communities provide effective outreach to the many landowners making decisions about land use and management practices on these lands. We surveyed California forest and rangeland owners in ten counties throughout the state to assess the impact of existing outreach and identify gaps in information distribution and content.