![]() ![]() We quickly realized that our non-advocacy, science-based model could be used to turn these challenges into opportunities for success. ![]() In addition to these social issues, designing a grazing impacts study in the Monument represented a significant scientific challenge because the majority of the area had been grazed for many decades, leaving us with no ungrazed habitats to use as “controls” against which grazing effects could be compared. All parties were concerned that individual partners or funding sources would introduce bias into our results. Expressing similar skepticism, many of the ranchers were concerned that we were working with the non-government environmental community on aspects of the study. At first, the environmental community voiced concerns about KBO working with the BLM on the study, showing their distrust of the agency. We were faced with both social and scientific challenges that put our new non-advocacy, science-based model to the test. Soon after the proclamation was issued, Klamath Bird Observatory began working with all the stakeholders to design and implement a grazing effects study in the Monument. ” This resulted in a tense atmosphere among stakeholders including the ranchers who had grazed livestock in the area for decades, an environmental community focused on reducing the negative impacts of grazing, and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), a government agency typically charged with multiple-use natural resource management but now tasked with coordinating a complicated scientific study and protecting an area for conservation purposes. The Presidential Proclamation called for a livestock grazing impacts study, stating that, “should grazing be found incompatible with protecting the objects of biological interest, the Secretary shall retire the grazing allotments. In 2000, Klamath Bird Observatory’s non-advocacy, science-based model was new to the region and we were well-positioned to facilitate what was escalating into a controversial issue. In fact, we had collected a lot of data in the area of the Monument documenting the biodiversity of birds, a group of animals identified in the proclamation as one of the many “objects of biological interest” to be protected in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument. It was this ecological integrity that our research, using birds as indicators, was designed to measure. The proclamation called for management in the Monument that ensures continued ecological integrity for the area. In that same year President Clinton issued a proclamation that established the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, protecting 52,000 acres referred to as “an ecological wonder” and “a biological crossroads-the interface of the Cascade, Klamath, and Siskiyou ecoregions, in an area of unique geology, biology, climate, and topography.” These lands are representative of the biodiversity for which the larger area we had been studying is widely recognized. In 2000, Klamath Bird Observatory incorporated, emerging from nearly 10 years of coordinated inventory and monitoring efforts in the Klamath-Siskiyou Bioregion of southern Oregon and northern California. ![]()
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