Celebrating A Decade of Data and Partnership: the Rangeland Monitoring Network turns 10!

February 17, 2026

About a decade ago, an innovative idea sparked a connection between scientists and ranchers that has been quietly transforming how we understand and steward California’s 21 million acres of private working lands.

In 2011 Point Blue launched the Rangeland Watershed Initiative (now the Working Lands Program), led by Wendell Gilgert and Geoff Geupel, which included the Partner Biologist program with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). By leveraging Farm Bill funds, we began expanding conservation practices across the state’s working lands. Alicia Herrera (now our most senior staff in the program) was our first Partner Biologist, and she was followed by about a dozen others, each with a deep respect for agricultural communities, ranching, and land stewardship. They built trusted relationships with landowners to implement practices that benefitted both operations and ecosystems—such as streamside fencing to restore riparian habitat and pollinator hedgerows to boost on-farm biodiversity.

The program was going well but as a science-based organization, we needed more data. Consistent and standardized data that could help us and ranchers analyze impact across ranches. At the time former Working Lands Director Libby Porzig was working on rangeland science with our partners at TomKat Ranch. She along with a few others thought, what if we created a whole network of rangeland study sites across the state that produced a shared, big picture of what worked, what didn’t, and what we could try next?

 

Well, we did exactly that. In 2014, with critical support from the TomKat Ranch Educational Foundation, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, The Bechtel Foundation, Regenerative Agriculture Foundation and the 11th Hour Project, we launched the Rangeland Monitoring Network. Since then, the network has been supported by The Elizabeth R. and William J. Patterson Foundation, Audubon Conservation Ranching, and numerous other private donors. A decade later, fourteen biologists in partnership with 145 ranches in 28 counties have together collected information on birds, plants, and soil: 2,375 bird points and over 500 plant and soil points to be more exact! We’ve built meaningful and lasting relationships across the network while doing rigorous and impactful science that is equipping us as a network to continue to celebrate our wins and tackle challenges that ranching communities and ecosystems face, like drought, extreme and irregular weather, and a changing policy landscape that affects resources available to the network.

“When I got the data, it was really amazing. My first landowner letter was very thorough and  insightful because I was taking over the ranch from my dad.  It was just a really good zoomed in and zoomed out reflection of where our property was at at that time. Our relationship with Point Blue has been a great, we’ve done five rounds of monitoring since, so we’ve got some pretty extensive data. I ended up with baseline data that I could use for my ecological outcome verified program that I did later with the Savory Institute.”
-Carrie Richards, Richards Regenerative Ranch Owner, Yuba County, RMN partner since 2017

So what did we find after working together for just over a decade?

Soils. Over the past decade, our research has shown that drought conditions are likely having a negative impact on soil carbon in rangelands. Even so, the soils in our network still hold a huge amount of carbon—an important function of healthy soils and resilient landscapes.

Understanding how climate, land management, and soil carbon interact is complex, but we’re learning a lot through long-term monitoring. Now that we’ve confirmed how strongly climate influences soil carbon, we’re ready to take the next step: exploring how different management practices affect carbon storage. Our goal is to find strategies that can help protect and even increase soil carbon and soil health across rangelands. And we’ve started this work through Ag-C Monitoring Framework, led by Dr. Erika Foster and the Point Blue Soil Research and Conservation Program.

Plants. Our data show that grazed grasslands provide a long-term, stable landscape for diverse plant communities to persist and flourish. Non-native annual grasses make up the majority of the plant biomass on California rangelands, and serve as an important forage resource for livestock. While this functional group is extremely important to the economic vitality of ranches, the majority of the plant biodiversity on California’s rangelands comes from native wildflowers. In fact, California’s grasslands have some of the highest species richness and endemism of any habitat in the state, and a large proportion of California’s rare and endangered plant species are found in grasslands, including coastal prairies and blue oak savannas. Grazing helps maintain this diverse composition of plants and prevents complete conversion to non-native monocultures.

We also documented a decrease in three invasive plant species over the last decade–barbed goatgrass, medusahead, and yellow starthistle. We believe this decline is connected to active invasive plant management by our land stewards through a combination of prescribed grazing, prescribed fire, and other methods. This result shows that active management of invasive plants can result in significant reductions in cover, which is great news for both forage quality and biodiversity.

 

Birds. We’ve recorded an impressive 248 bird species across California’s rangelands! Even better, many of our key oak woodland and grassland birds are holding steady—or even increasing in number. These are especially positive results considering that bird populations across North America, especially grassland birds, are declining at an alarming rate. A 2019 study estimated that the continent has lost nearly 3 billion birds since 1970, or a quarter of the total bird population. While California’s rangelands can’t reverse these national trends alone, our data show they’re playing an important role by supporting healthy bird populations and offering vital habitat across vast, working landscapes.

“Ecological monitoring [from RMN] helps tell me where to focus my time and effort in a world that has finite time and dollars. That really really really really matters to me.”
-Byron Palmer, Grazing Manager, Sonoma Mountain Institute, Co Owner of Grounded Grassfed, Sonoma County, RMN partner since 2014

What’s Next?

Our decade-long dataset, along with our daily experiences on the ground with dedicated rangeland stewards, demonstrate the incredible value of California’s rangelands. Not only are they home to over 655,000 beef cattle and around 13,700 ranches, they play a major role in supporting biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and wildlife habitat across the state. Without the land base dedicated to economically viable livestock grazing operations, California’s rangelands are at risk of conversion to other forms of intensive agriculture or urban development, threatening the biodiversity and many ecosystem services these landscapes provide.

 

As we enter the next decade of the Rangeland Monitoring Network, we’re ready to dig deeper into the connections between land management and the many ecosystem services that rangelands provide. We need to better understand how different management practices influence soil carbon storage, and to identify strategies that help reduce carbon loss. We’ll also continue working closely with land managers to develop recommendations that reduce invasive species and protect native plant diversity. At the same time, we aim to expand our focus on birds—exploring how populations on privately managed rangelands compare to established conservation goals, and partnering with stewards to enhance bird habitat through practices like prescribed grazing, oak plantings, riparian restoration, and more. Through this work, we hope to support both the ecological integrity and economic viability of California’s rangelands into the future. Key to all of this is maintaining and growing our partnerships with ranchers, who have served as some of the states greatest land stewards.

“Ranchers aren’t the bad guy. They’re not out here trying to degrade landscapes. We work with multi-generation landowners that are excellent stewards of their lands, and honestly they’re the best people to be out there managing those lands. Ranching and livestock management is really important to local communities. It’s part of the community. Hopefully people can have more patience for cows crossing the road, and things like that.”
-Billy Freeman, Sierra Foothill Conservancy, Mariposa, Madera & Fresno Counties, RMN partner since 2014

If you’d like to learn more about our Rangeland Monitoring Network impact over the past decade and learn how to get involved, reach out to our Working Lands Director, Bonnie Eyestone at beyestone@pointblue.org and explore our new StoryMap at www.pointblue.org/rmn-storymap. Watch a 13-minute tour of the StoryMap below.