Adina Merenlender

University of California, Berkeley | UCB · Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management

Bats are among the least well-known mammals, particularly in terms of their behavior and activity patterns during the winter. Here, we use passive acoustic monitoring to overcome some of the challenges inherent in surveying cryptic forest bats during the wet season to quantify overwintering behavior for 11 species in California coast redwood forest...

Climate refugia, areas where climate is expected to remain relatively stable, can offer a near‐term safe haven for species sensitive to warming temperatures and drought. Understanding the influence of temperature, moisture, and disturbance on sensitive species is critical during this time of rapid climate change. Coastal habitats can serve as impor...

Education per se does not necessarily foster positive environmental behaviors; rather, a complex assemblage of influences including social integration, discovering shared values, strengthening environmental identity, self-efficacy, and agency is needed to foster environmental stewardship. We examine the participant outcomes from a new adult climate...

Overwhelming evidence points to the importance of maintaining connectivity given rapidly fragmenting habitats and climate change. Many efforts to identify where ecological corridors should be placed are based on estimates of structural connectivity that take advantage of readily available land-cover data. We provide an overview of structural connec...

Well-managed and connected protected area networks are needed to combat the 6th mass extinction, yet the implementation of plans intended to secure landscape connectivity remains insufficient. The failure to translate planning efforts into effective action (i.e., the research-implementation gap) hinders our ability to conserve biodiversity threaten...

Climate-wise connectivity is essential to provide species access to suitable habitats in the future, yet we lack a consistent means of quantifying climate adaptation benefits of habitat linkages. Species range shifts to cooler climates have been widely observed, suggesting we should protect pathways providing access to cooler locations. However, in...

Vinecology, the integration of ecological and viticultural practices, focuses on the working landscapes of the Mediterranean‐climate biomes to make wine‐grape production compatible with species conservation. We examined how maintaining remnant native vegetation and surrounding natural areas in and around vineyards, two primary practices of vinecolo...

Protected areas (PAs) are essential to biodiversity conservation, but their static boundaries may undermine their potential for protecting species under climate change. We assessed how the climatic conditions within global terrestrial PAs may change over time. By 2070, protection is expected to decline in cold and warm climates and increase in cool...

Climate change is leading to widespread elevational shifts thought to increase species extinction risk in mountains. We integrate digital elevation models with a metric of human pressure to examine changes in the amount of intact land area available for species undergoing elevational range shifts in all major mountain ranges globally (n = 1010). Ne...

Most protected areas globally have a dual mission to conserve natural resources and provide access for outdoor recreation or ecotourism, yet questions remain about the ecological effects of recreation. We conducted a global meta‐analysis of the effects of recreation on vertebrate richness and abundance. We estimated that vertebrate richness (n = 15...

Conservation scientists need to advance climate literacy so that people understand how climate affects all of life, acquire the skills to communicate about climate change, and become aware of ways to increase local resiliency. We examined syllabus content for 74 general climate change courses taught at the undergraduate college‐level to investigate...

Migrating wildlife species across the globe face a dire predicament as their traditional migratory routes are cut off by human encroachment. Forced into smaller and smaller patches of habitat, they must compete more aggressively for dwindling food resources and territory. This is more than just an unfortunate side effect of human progress. As key s...

A nature-friendly matrix As the human population has grown, we have taken and modified more and more land, leaving less and less for nonhuman species. This is clearly unsustainable, and the amount of land we protect for nature needs to be increased and preserved. However, this still leaves vast regions of the world unprotected and modified. Such la...

Connectivity between natural areas is crucial to mitigate climate change effects on biodiversity across human-modified landscapes. Linkages that offer climate adaptation and landscape connectivity benefits are particularly important in species-rich and topographically-diverse areas like Mediterranean landscapes. Climate connectivity is often evalua...

Empirical studies and habitat suitability modeling project significant shifts in species distributions in response to climate change. Because habitat fragmentation can impede species range shifts, wildlife corridors may have increasing importance in enhancing climate resilience for species persistence. While habitat connectivity has been studied fo...

Although a plethora of habitat-connectivity plans exists, protecting and restoring connectivity through on-the-ground action has been slow. We identified challenges to and opportunities for connectivity conservation through a literature review of project implementation, a workshop with scientists and conservation practitioners, 3 case studies of co...

Keeping landscapes connected via habitat linkages is the most frequently recommended approach to maintain ecosystem resilience in the face of climate change. However, in general, local land conservation agencies and their partners lack sufficient data to advance on-the-ground projects in a way that accounts for the connectivity value and climate be...

Significance Mountain ranges constitute biodiversity hotspots, and montane species are shifting their ranges in elevation in response to climate change. Protecting elevational gradients can help fully capture montane biodiversity patterns and facilitate species range shifts. We map the protection of elevational gradients for mountain ranges worldwi...

In Mediterranean regions and other areas with variable climates, interannual weather variability may impact ecosystem dynamics, and by extension ecological restoration projects. Conditions at reference sites, which are often used to evaluate restoration projects, may also be influenced by weather variability, confounding interpretations of restorat...

Outdoor recreation is typically assumed to be compatible with biodiversity conservation and is permitted in most protected areas worldwide. However, increasing numbers of studies are discovering negative effects of recreation on animals. We conducted a systematic review of the scientific literature and analyzed 274 articles on the effects of non-co...

Ecosystem service maps are increasingly being used to prioritize management and conservation decisions. Most of these maps rely on estimates of ecosystem services estimated for individual land cover classes rather than incorporating field data. We developed combined field models (CFM) using regression analysis to estimate ecosystem services based o...

Amateur naturalists have played an important role in the study and conservation of nature since the 17(th) century. Today, naturalist groups make important contributions to bridge the gap between conservation science and practice around the world. We examined data from two regional naturalist programs to understand participant motivations, barriers...

Background/Question/Methods Habitat connectivity planning is complicated by the physical and habitat complexity – as well as the variety of land use types – found in California. In addition, habitat connectivity models are rarely tested against empirical data. Here we describe landscape permeability models derived from an estimated linear relatio...

Background/Question/Methods The UC California Naturalist Program is a new interdisciplinary education program focused on teaching ecology and natural history to foster a scientifically literate public ready to contribute to environmental problem solving. With this goal, it is important to understand how interest in science and the environment dev...

Although the negative impacts of roads on many terrestrial vertebrate and bird populations are well documented, there have been few studies of the road ecology of bats. To examine the effects of large roads on bat populations, we used acoustic recorders to survey bat activity along ten 300 m transects bordering three large highways in northern Cali...

River basin managers responsible for water allocation decisions are increasingly required to evaluate tradeoffs between environmental flow protections and human water security. However, the basin-scale effects of environmental flow regulations on water users are not well understood, in part because analyses are complicated by the spatial and tempor...

Freshwater ecosystem health has been increasingly linked to floodplain connectivity, and some river restoration efforts now overtly target reconnecting floodplain habitats for species recovery. The dynamic nature of floodplain habitats is not typically accounted for in efforts to plan and evaluate potential floodplain reconnection projects. This st...

With small reservoirs increasingly employed to meet human water needs, tools that consider cumulative effects of multiple small reservoirs through space and time are essential for understanding impacts of these spatially distributed stresses on catchment hydrology and related ecological processes. We used a GIS-based hydrologic model to predict str...

Hydrologic alterations designed to provide a stable water supply and to prevent flooding are commonly used in mediterranean-climate river (med-rivers) basins, and these alterations have led to habitat loss and significant declines in aquatic biodiversity. Often the health of freshwater ecosystems depends on maintaining and recovering hydrologic hab...

With some of the highest biodiversity on the planet, the Mediterranean Biome is experiencing a conservation crisis driven by high human population density, development, and habitat fragmentation. While protected areas safeguard some critical habitat, economic realities require conservation efforts in humandominated landscapes to maintain biodiversi...

Designing reserve networks often requires a tradeoff between maximizing patch sizes to decrease local extinction rates and clustering patches to increase colonization rates. Here we use stochastic metapopulation models to evaluate how this tradeoff affects landscape-wide extinction risk for idealized terrestrial mammals with body sizes from 10 g to...

We examine inconsistencies in the application of environmental laws and policies to California's oak woodlands and associated resources. Specifically, large-scale vegetation removals receive different levels of environmental oversight depending on location, tree species, and the final land use designation. Hence, situations arise where the scale of...

Increasing human pressures on freshwater resources have led to global declines in fish populations and have made the protection of instream flows critical to the conservation of riverine ecosystems. However, uncertainty in predicting ecological responses to flow variability has hindered implementation of successful environmental flow management. An...

The California Naturalist Handbook provides a fun, science-based introduction to California’s natural history with an emphasis on observation, discovery, communication, stewardship and conservation. It is a hands-on guide to learning about the natural environment of California. Subjects covered include California natural history and geology, native...

Landscape connectivity, the extent to which a landscape facilitates the movements of organisms and their genes, faces critical threats from both fragmentation and habitat loss. Many conservation efforts focus on protecting and enhancing connectivity to offset the impacts of habitat loss and fragmentation on biodiversity conservation, and to increas...

Background/Question/Methods The goal of conservation planning is to design networks of reserves that will ensure the long-term persistence of biodiversity in landscapes undergoing habitat conversion. Common quantitative approaches to conservation planning use complementarity-based algorithms to represent as many species as possible in a reserve n...

In developed countries dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) are permitted to accompany human visitors to many protected areas (e.g., >96% of protected lands in California, U.S.A.), and protected-area management often focuses on regulating dogs due to concerns about predation, competition, or transmission of disease and conflicts with human visitors. In 20...

1. In Mediterranean and other water-stressed climates, water management is critical to the conservation of freshwater ecosystems. To secure and maintain water allocations for the environment, integrated water management approaches are needed that consider ecosystem flow requirements, patterns of human water demands and the temporal and spatial dyna...

Over the past two decades, watershed restoration has dramatically increased internationally. California has been at the forefront, allocating billions of dollars to restoration activities through legislation and voter-approved bonds. Yet, the implications of restoration remain ambiguous because there has been little examination of restoration accom...

Long-term data are needed to assess spatial and temporal variability of communities and their resilience to natural and anthropogenic disturbances, particularly in climatic regions marked by high interannual variability (e.g. mediterranean- climate). A long-term study at four sites on two streams in mediterranean-climate California (annual sampling...

One of the fastest growing types of land-use change is exurban development—low-density housing outside urban service boundaries. However, how individual species are responding to exurban development remains uncertain. We monitored birds for 5 years across three housing density levels in northern California oak woodlands. We compared community and s...

Rural residential development can impact habitat and complicate fire management. Conservation easements are created to prevent development but are rarely assessed for their influence on development patterns. In the Lassen Foothills, California, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) holds over 37,000ha of mostly public-funded conservation easements on ranchl...

This chapter details the impacts of exurban development on water quantity and quality in the United States. The chapter begins by reviewing studies that document the consequences of urbanization on water quality, with emphasis on exurban development. We show how watersheds are contaminated by a range of organic and inorganic compounds as land use a...

Small streams are increasingly under pressure to meet water needs associated with expanding human development, but the hydrologic and ecological effects are not commonly described in scientific literature. To evaluate the potential effects that surface water abstraction can have on flow regime, scientists and resource managers require tools that co...

Though many river studies have documented the impacts of large water projects on stream hydrology, few have described the effects of dispersed, small-scale water projects on streamflow or aquatic ecosystems. We used streamflow and air temperature data collected in the northern California wine country to characterize the influence of small instream...

In many parts of coastal California, agricultural water needs during the summer are met by tapping riparian and groundwater resources, which has led to documented decreases in stream flow during the dry season. This has consequences for salmon, including sudden drying of habitat, higher water temperatures and changes in the invertebrate prey base....

In many parts of coastal California, agricultural water needs during the summer are met by tapping riparian and groundwater resources, which has led to documented decreases in stream flow during the dry season. This has consequences for salmon, including sudden drying of habitat, higher water temperatures and changes in the invertebrate prey base....

Protected areas around the world were created with the goals of preserving biodiversity and providing nature-based recreation opportunities for millions of people. This dual mandate guides the management of the majority of the world's protected areas, but there is growing evidence that quiet, nonconsumptive recreation may not be compatible with bio...

Conservation easements have emerged as an important tool for land trusts and government agencies aiming to conserve private land in the United States. Despite the increase in public investment in conservation easement acquisitions, little is known about their conservation outcomes, particularly at a landscape scale. The nine-county San Francisco Ba...

Land use change can adversely affect water quality and freshwater ecosystems, yet our ability to predict how systems will respond to different land uses, particularly rural-residential development, is limited by data availability and our understanding of biophysical thresholds. In this study, we use spatially explicit parcel-level data to examine t...

European red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) were introduced into lowland California in the 1880s for fur farming and hunting. The introduced foxes quickly spread throughout much of the state and have been implicated in the decline of several federally threatened and endangered ground-nesting bird species. Red foxes have been present in the East Bay for 25 t...

Land use change can adversely affect water quality and freshwater ecosystems, yet our ability to predict how systems will respond to different land uses, particularly rural-residential development, is limited by data availability and our understanding of biophysical thresholds. In this study, we use spatially explicit parcel-level data to examine t...

Historical and recent remote sensing data can be used to address temporal and spatial relationships between upland land cover and downstream vegetation response at the watershed scale. This is demonstrated for sub-watersheds draining into Elkhorn Slough, California, where salt marsh habitat has diminished because of the formation of sediment fans t...

As part of the National River Restoration Science Synthesis (NRRSS), we developed a summary database of 4,023 stream restoration projects built in California since 1980, from which we randomly selected 44 records for in-depth interviews with project managers. Despite substantial difficulties in gathering the data, we were able to draw conclusions a...

Large wood exerts strong influences on stream channel morphology and aquatic ecosystems. Previously, in-stream large wood has generally been equated with dead wood. However, in streams in Northern California we found that living wood – trees that entered the channel but remained rooted and living – represented a major portion of the functional in-s...

Conservation easements are one of the primary tools for conserving biodiversity on private land. Despite their increasing use, little quantitative data are available on what species and habitats conservation easements aim to protect, how much structural development they allow, or what types of land use they commonly permit. To address these knowled...

Compliance monitoring of easement properties is monitoring to see if the easement is being stewarded as agreed in the terms and objectives of the easement. Additional monitoring of natural resources also called ecological monitoring can provide important information on ecological status and trends and can be part of an assessment of the effectivene...

Watersheds are ecologically and socially dynamic and restoration efforts that fail to recognize the importance of the social context will fail to address the sources of degradation. Over the last two decades California has allocated billions of dollars to watershed restoration activities through legislation and voter-approved bonds. Yet, the implic...

Corridor Ecology presents guidelines that combine conservation science and practical experience for maintaining, enhancing, and creating connectivity between natural areas with an overarching goal of conserving biodiversity. It offers an objective, carefully interpreted review of the issues and is a one-of-a-kind resource for scientists, landscape...

We used digitized aerial photographs on a geographical information system, historical stream flow records, and water rights records to model the effects of existing, pending, and future small reservoirs on stream flow on six tributaries to the Russian River in Sonoma County. Institutions governing whether these reservoirs can operate as constructed...

Intensive land use can fragment continuous natural areas into smaller patches, which may be too small to support viable populations of native fauna and more susceptible to invasion by alien species. We demonstrate the utility of combining species occurrence models with land-use change models to identify areas where future development may differenti...

Funds available to purchase land and easements for conservation purposes are limited. This article provides a targeting strategy for protecting multiple environmental benefits that includes heterogeneity in land costs and probability of land-use conversion, by incorporating spatially explicit land-use change and hedonic price models. This strategy...

In the last two decades, watershed restoration has dramatically increased in both popularity and practice, yet the social and environmental outcomes of restoration remain ambiguous. This research addresses three central questions: 1) What is watershed restoration accomplishing on-the-ground?, 2) Who and what primarily benefit from dominant restorat...