Santa Barbara County Conservation Blueprint: Creating a Landscape of Opportunity

<div>In an era of population growth, global markets, and climate change, Santa Barbara County’s citizens must together address the question of how to conserve the landscapes and biodiversity that make Santa Barbara County special, while also making it an economically viable and livable place for local residents. Ensuring the ongoing viability of these landscapes and the benefits they provide requires shared tools, language, and dialogue. This is why the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County, the Santa Barbara Foundation LEAF (Landscapes, Ecosystems, Agriculture, and Food Systems) Initiative, and the Cachuma Resource Conservation District came together to develop the Santa Barbara County Conservation Blueprint (Blueprint).</div><div><br></div><div>The purpose of the Blueprint is to provide a common language and platform for publicly available data to support in-depth conversations and informed decisions about the Santa Barbara County landscape.</div><div><br></div><div>Nearly two years of design, research, data collection, interviews, focus groups, and public input meetings went into the creation of this report and its companion online interactive Atlas and web resources. The Blueprint report focuses exclusively on the land base and terrestrial natural resources, and is broken into four main chapters, summarized below. Each chapter also addresses climate impacts, interconnections across theme areas, common values and elements of resilience within each theme, and stories of multi-benefit solutions to shared resource challenges. The report contains dozens of maps on each theme, and points readers to explore more of the nearly 300 publicly available, science-based datasets in the online Atlas.</div><div><br></div><div>Together, the Blueprint report and online Atlas offer a first step toward a common understanding of Santa Barbara County’s current environmental conditions, the impacts of human interaction with the land, and the conscious tradeoffs required to create a landscape of opportunity for generations to come.</div