Riverside County Seeks to Link Preserves

While leaders of the Wildlands Project are making long-range plans to connect wilderness areas across the continent, a more modest--some would say more practical--effort is underway in the foothills of southwestern Riverside County.

The project, believed to be the first of its kind in the state, would link the Santa Rosa Plateau Ecological Reserve to the Cleveland National Forest, just 3.5 miles away. The goal: protecting a strip of land called the Tenaja Corridor so that bobcats, mule deer, coyotes and mountain lions can move freely between the plateau and the forest.

Even plant seeds can travel along the corridor, attached to the feet and fur of roving animals, in turn promoting healthier native vegetation.

“What you want to avoid is the preserve becoming essentially a biological island,” said Bill Burford, project manager for the Nature Conservancy of California, which is running the effort.

The Tenaja Corridor project illustrates one way of attaining the Wildlands Project’s goal of building corridors to preserve the health of plants and animals. Some scientists working on the effort also helped design corridor maps for the Wildlands Project.

The work extends 15 years of effort by the Nature Conservancy and others to assemble the Santa Rosa Plateau reserve--8,200 hilly acres containing rare oaks, vernal pools and other vestiges of native California--which stands out like an island on land. Isolation can hasten extinction on such islands, where inbreeding weakens species and make them more prone to disease. Without the planned corridor, the plateau could lose its ability to sustain animals such as bobcats.

“And once you start losing the top carnivores, you start losing diversity right down the line,” said Conservancy biologist Trisha Smith.

The Nature Conservancy is best known for buying or managing ecologically valuable lands to preserve their natural values. But it does not plan to transform the Tenaja Corridor into a full-scale reserve. Instead, the group has purchased 38 separate properties within the strip, totaling 600 acres worth about $4 million.

Now the group is preparing to resell some of those properties to what it calls “conservation buyers,” people interested in owning land protected by special rules known as conservation easements. In the Tenaja Corridor, those rules are intended to keep development sparse and minimize barriers to wildlife, such as fences and lights. That allows animals to continue roaming the corridor while people live there.

To date, the Nature Conservancy has resold or is preparing to resell properties to six buyers. Although the final cost is unknown, the Nature Conservancy has spent $3.5 million on the project.

Burford is confident that many more buyers will become involved with the program. The attraction, he said, is “to be part of what is in essence an experiment in conservation.”