Ah, the California desert! Flickr user ManualFoci captured this shot of an ocotillo cactus in the foreground at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in March. (Did you know that Anza-Borrego is California’s largest state park and a critical habitat for bighorn sheep?) Thanks for sharing it through The Nature Conservancy’s Flickr group!

See all of The Nature Conservancy’s featured daily nature images—submitted to the Conservancy’s Flickr group by people like you—at my.nature.org.

And get inspired to take your own great nature shots—check out our favorite nature photography features, including amazing slideshows and tips from the pros. You can even enter your best stuff in our 6th Annual Digital Photography Contest!

UPDATE: You can now listen to a recording of Annamaria’s winning essay here.

“This country immerses you, wraps its stories round you, makes you care about them.”

That line comes from Annamaria Weldon’s winning entry to the inaugural Nature Conservancy Australia Nature Writing Prize. Her essay, entitled “Threshold Country,” tells a story that is at once so deeply personal and sweepingly engaging that it — like the country it lovingly celebrates — can’t help but make you care.

It’s the kind of writing we were hoping to inspire when we launched this new biennial contest roughly a year ago. We solicited essays that celebrated both nature writing and Australia’s landscapes. What we received was an extraordinary mosaic of language that not only describes the magnificence of natural Australia but also makes a compelling case for why conserving our continent is so crucial.

That made picking a winner all the more difficult. When it came time to review submissions, we found that we’d collected 136 entries. Our judges had a tough task ahead of them.

Luckily, they were up to the challenge. The able jury was composed of Mark Tredinnick — an acclaimed poet and essayist who makes nature a frequent subject — and Sally Blakeney, a literary journalist and reviewer. Together, they winnowed an impressive pool of essays down to a short list of five pieces, including one penned by famed Australian novelist Nick Drayson.

And then there was Weldon’s essay. Weldon lives in Fremantle, Western Australia, but she was born in Malta and her childhood took her through North Africa, Central America and the U.K. She came to Western Australia in 1984, and her well-traveled background gives her special insight into how a landscape’s physical characteristics create a sense of place.

Annamaria Weldon.

That insight permeates “Threshold Country,” which explores the impermanence of Yalgorup National Park’s fragile thrombolites (column-like microbial structures) and their vulnerability to the increased development occurring in the nearby city of Manduray. Weldon describes the time she spends among the thrombolites and the feeling of comfort — of being at home — that she derives from them. “Can we learn in time to tread more lightly here?” she wonders.

“Threshold Country” earned Weldon a $5000 prize, generously provided by the McLean Foundation, and it was published in the final volume of indigo, a Western Australian literary journal. Tredinnick and Blakeney referred to the piece as “a marvellously orchestrated, complex meditation on belonging. It is at once assured and yet gently voiced.”

For my part, I was entranced by the ease with which the essay places readers in Yalgorup among the threatened thrombolites. Weldon writes of how the land’s Traditional Owners, the Bindjareb people, based their culture on an understanding of the region’s natural beauty. It’s a message with special significance to the Conservancy: a major focus of work is helping Indigenous Australians manage protected areas to yield both natural and livelihood benefits.

“I felt this terrain had something to tell me, something I needed to learn, about loss of country and recovering a sense of place,” Weldon writes. Her essay helps us understand just how important conserving that sense of place is, and we’re grateful our new nature writing prize gave her a chance to do so.

Read the full text of Annamaria’s essay here.

Read the full text of other essays short-listed by the contest’s judges:

Steve McAlpine — Living on the Edge: Observations from the Darling Scarp

Tanya Massy — Pulse

Nick Drayson — My Place

(First Image: Containing rivers, salt lakes. arid lands, mountains and ancient eucalyptus forests, the landscape of the Gondwana Link project area in south Western Australia is an extraordinarily rich and complex ecological mosaic containing some the world’s most ancient habitats. Image credit ©Ami Vitale. Second image 2: Courtesy Annamaria Weldon. Audio credit: Lee Kennedy @ Studio Kraze).

It’s bad and it’s back: the 2011 State of the Birds Report was released today by Department of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

This report, the third annual State of the Birds Report, features an analysis of birds on public lands in the United States. Previous year’s reports, in 2009 and 2010, dealt with birds as indicators of environmental health and climate change, respectively. 

The report is very timely, given President Obama’s focus on public lands through the America’s Great Outdoors initiative, which the Conservancy strongly supports.

Once again, I was part of the team that developed the report, continuing to lead the aridlands habitat analyses. What made this report possible at this point in time was the availability of two key pieces of information: modeled bird distribution data across the country and a full dataset on public lands of the U.S.

The first piece, modeled bird distributions, was made possible by the growing size and maturity of the eBird project, run by Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon. This “citizen science” effort has collected hundreds of thousands of bird observations across the country. The Cornell team, with essential support from Cornell University, used these data to model the occurrence of bird species at a regularly spaced grid in the U.S. This allowed us to estimate the percent of each species on public and non-public lands using the second key piece: the Protected Areas Dataset of the U.S. (PAD-US).

The PAD-US, developed by the U.S. Geological Survey’s GAP Analysis Program, is a first-of-its-kind map of protected areas in the U.S. This dataset includes almost all public and tribal lands plus many importantly privately owned areas, including reserves of The Nature Conservancy. It is this dataset that allowed us to allocate the modeled bird distributions between public and non-public lands and, within public lands, between the major federal and state land managing agencies. These latter include the Bureau of Land Management, Department of Defense, National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Forest Service, and state park and forest systems.

What did we find out? There are about 850 million acres of publicly owned land in the U.S. and 3.5 million square miles of ocean (all off-shore waters of the U.S. are publicly owned). We found that over 300 birds in the U.S. have half or more of their distribution on public lands, illustrating the critical dependence of birds on our public lands.

Examples of some species or groups that are particularly dependent on public lands include forest birds of Hawai’i, where the entire population of some endangered species is only found on public lands; aridlands species such as Gunnison sage-grouse, sage sparrow, and Le Conte’s thrasher, each of which have over 75% of their distribution on public lands; and arctic, alpine and boreal forest breeding birds in Alaska. In contrast, birds of eastern forests and grasslands have very low proportions of their distributions on public lands, highlighting the general small area of public lands containing these habitat types.

Given the amount of work that the Conservancy does with land managing agency partners, the sections of the report on each agency are very interesting reading. The Bureau of Land Management, which manages more acres than any other agency, has enormous responsibilities for aridlands and a variety of arctic species, such as sanderling. The U.S. Forest Service, as might be expected, has high responsibility for birds in all forest types in the U.S., particularly western forests (for species such as white-headed woodpecker and Williamson’s sapsucker), alpine species (white-tailed ptarmigan, black and brown-capped rosy-finch), and Mexican pine-oak forest (including Mexican Ccickadee, painted redstart, Grace’s warbler).

Perhaps the most interesting finding for any agency was the importance of lands managed by state agencies, including wildlife management areas, natural areas, state forests, state parks, state trust lands and recreation areas. State agencies, collectively owning 189 million acres, have relatively large holdings of boreal forest, marsh and grassland habitats. State-owned boreal forests are particularly important for species such as black-backed woodpecker, blackpoll warbler and Bicknell’s thrush.

The analyses used in the 2011 State of the Birds Report will be particularly helpful in helping the Conservancy, numerous conservation partners and the public agencies themselves in formulating land management policies that can facilitate the long-term conservation of birds on public lands.

These data are very important right now as the nation moves forward in addressing its energy needs. For example, work recently done by Conservancy scientists shows how wind energy can be located with minimal impact to natural areas and wildlife. This work can be further integrated with the bird distribution generated by the State of the Birds team to rigorously assess how energy needs can be met with minimal or no impact on birds.

In a similar vein, these data on bird distribution could be used to provide input on how and where to locate solar energy facilities in the southwest in the context of the Solar Energy Development Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement which the Conservancy is actively assisting on.

I’ve only begun to tap the surface of the findings in this year’s State of the Birds Report. Please check out the full report and supporting information at www.stateofthebirds.org and enjoy your public lands!

(Image: Sanderling feed along the surf of Goosewing Beach, Westport area of Rhode Island. Image credit: ©Mark Godfrey)

Of course scientists are people, too! And the reverse is also true — ordinary people can do science. Citizen science, that is.

Citizen science — people helping scientists collect data on a big scale the scientists couldn’t access themselves — is hot. We’re talking the Christmas Bird Count held yearly by the National Audubon Society. A survey of 750,000 banded snails to find out how they’re evolved over the last 40 years due to climate change. A web-based weather monitoring effort for Arizona called Rainlog. (Lots more examples at scienceforcitizens.net.)

The Nature Conservancy’s a leader in citizen science — our volunteers are doing everything from monitoring horseshoe crabs on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean to tracing (on foot, on horseback, by ATV) how far Arizona’s San Pedro River reaches across the land every third weekend in June, at the height of that state’s dry summer season…when it’s scorching hot. (At least they start at 6AM.)

But where does all that data lead? Conservancy scientists Dale Turner and Holly Richter have just published a paper in the journal Environmental Management on just what those dozens of volunteers have found over the last 11 years in the Arizona sun — and how it’s helping protect the San Pedro (a critical habitat for migratory birds) and boost its PR, too. I chatted with Turner to find out more. (Also, see more info about Arizona’s three major river systems and how the Conservancy is helping protect them.)

____________

The San Pedro is a perennial river — which means it has a channel in which it’s always flowing, but then the river also flows out of that and is wet on the land outside of the channel in certain areas for certain periods of the year…is that about right?

DALE TURNER: Yes, it has a defined channel that has a continuous flow. The San Pedro is a small river, so that perennial flow might be very small. In the middle of summer, the perennial flow is something you can often jump across without getting your feet wet. But at flood stage, it can be a fairly large river, fairly violent, takes trees and houses and cars and things like that.

But even though it can flood, the San Pedro is still threatened, right?

TURNER: Yes. It’s primarily a groundwater-driven system, and its persistence is highly threatened by groundwater extraction from neighboring cities and agriculture. The river has lost 50 percent of its original perennial length.

Which is bad news for the wildlife that depend on the river. So is that how this citizen science effort started — because you wanted to measure its “perennial length” outside of the channel, not just its flow in the channel?

TURNER: Right. The three gages [measuring devices] in the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area had been indicating that the river’s rate of flow was decreasing for the same season of the year over time, so there was concern that the river was drying up. But the only way to know if the perennial length was changing over time was to do a longitudinal survey that mapped how long it was flowing on the surface at the same time each year.

So how did you recruit over 100 people to go out into the desert at 6am the third weekend in June and walk (in some cases) four or five miles to help you?

TURNER: Let me preface this by saying that, when my colleague Holly Richter started this effort, there was some debate within the community of Sierra Vista, the largest town along the San Pedro River, as to the viability of the river. Some people thought that it was just fine, there was lots of water, there wasn’t a problem. Other people thought it’s basically dead, it’s mostly dry, there’s nothing left. So gathering some data about what was actually there was in part to answer that wide divergence of opinions.

Once the recognition came that we needed some measure of how much of surface flow was left, it was obvious that we needed a lot of people on one day. Volunteers were pretty much the only way to achieve that. What we discovered in the process was that it’s also a great way to reconnect people with their river.

Really? How?

TURNER: It has become a community event. You get Bureau of Land Management staff and Nature Conservancy staff and local landowners, local politicians, scientists, hunters, just the whole gamut of society who have some interest in the river, all down there on the same day getting their feet wet. When we started, we were covering an 80‑kilometer reach of the San Pedro. Last summer, we covered 212 kilometers, along with probably another 100 kilometers of tributary channels. So the project has grown dramatically.

The third weekend in June — that’s when the river’s flow is at its lowest. Why monitor then?

TURNER: In Southern Arizona, we have a very predictable dry summer and a wet summer. The dry summer, typically April, May, June, temperatures get over 100 degrees most every day, and you can pretty much count on it not raining. So, by measuring at the end of the dry summer season, we’re getting perhaps the best gauge of the groundwater conditions that are supporting the surface flow by getting surface flow at its very lowest point before there is recharge from that summer’s rains.

What are the volunteers looking for?

TURNER: The process and the data they are collecting are fairly simple. They go out with a GPS unit and a map, so they know where they’re at, and a predefined length of the river that they are to walk. They record with the GPS unit and on a data form the starting point and the ending point of every wet reach of the river, so every flowing section gets defined by a point at each end.

So what have they found?

TURNER: The length of permanent surface flow — which length of the river is wetted on the third week of June every year — has overall has been relatively stable. But there’s a lot of reach‑to‑reach variation, which almost certainly represents variation in local groundwater exploitation and possibly local water supply variability, due to groundwater inflows coming from nearby mountains.

Probably the most interesting result has been the one portion that had a significant trend across the 12 years of data. It also happens to be the portion where we in collaboration with several partners have retired a number of parcels of irrigated agriculture that had been pumping groundwater for their farming.

I was going to ask — how does all this inform conservation of the river?

TURNER: It had been our expectation that eliminating those groundwater withdrawals close to the river would translate into more water appearing in the river. That was just a hypothesis, and while a fairly reasonable hypothesis, it’s something that’s difficult to prove, because this is a large and complex system. But we have based a land protection strategy on that hypothesis at a number of places along the San Pedro, and this data is probably the strongest evidence we have of the success of that strategy.

There has also been a lot of interest in the data on the part of other scientists. This is a dataset that would be difficult for most academics or even agencies to gather because it covers such a large area and has been running for so many years. The fact that we’ve been able to organize and maintain this effort over time has made it a really valuable resource.

So, 11 years after you started this effort, are people who live around the river still writing it off?

TURNER: I think there is a greater understanding that this is still a viable system with strong natural values. Because of the surveys, a lot of people have seen firsthand the beauty, the vitality of a functioning riparian ecosystem simply by getting out there and getting their feet wet.

But the surveys have also highlighted the vulnerability of the San Pedro, because when you see the river in June, there is not a lot of water left, and by getting a visceral sense of how little is there and how fragile it is, I think people get a far better understanding of the potential loss and how easily that could happen.

Editor’s note: Learn more about the San Pedro River mapping effort and see the maps the data have generated.

(Image: Holly Richter, the Conservancy’s Upper San Pedro River program director, uses a GPS unit to map a stretch of river, her trusty horse Macky provides the transport. Image credit: Holly Richter/TNC.)

For much of its recent history, the Fish River property has been a cattle station that, due to being isolated at the far northern end of Australia near the Daly River, carried very few cattle. Its remote location and lack of infrastructure made the commercial herding of livestock economically impractical, leaving intact some 450,000 acres (700 square miles) of northern Australia’s environmentally invaluable savannas.

It is here that the Conservancy has forged a new partnership that promises to conserve habitat for wildlife and provide sustainable livelihoods for people.

The Nature Conservancy and the Pew Charitable Trusts, through our joint Wild Australia program, worked with the Australian Government to help the Indigenous Land Corporation (ILC) purchase Fish River Station. The ILC — a statutory authority established to acquire and manage land to assist in delivering economic and cultural benefits to Indigenous people — will now work to turn ownership of Fish River over to the Traditional Owners of this country to manage it sustainably. Bolstered by training and support from the Conservancy, Indigenous rangers will lead this effort, which will provide sustainable livelihoods as well as lasting conservation results.

The purchase will have enormous benefits for Australia’s people and wildlife. By buying the land and returning it to the Indigenous peoples that have served as the Outback’s caretakers for millennia, we believe that we’ve found the best case scenario for an area that boasts extraordinary natural assets.

Those assets include nearly 600 species of plants; an array of threatened wildlife species, like the Gouldian finch, northern quoll and black-footed tree-rat (which is far cuter than it sounds); and extensive chunks savanna woodland, as well as important areas of monsoon rainforest, which is a scarce and valuable habitat type.

Crucially, Fish River Station is an important component of an expanding network of protected areas, called the Trans-Australia Eco-Link, which stretches from Australia’s Top End in the north to Spencer Gulf in the south. And the establishment of Fish River as conservation property has also inspired the Northern Territory government to make preliminary commitments toward setting aside adjacent lands as protected areas.

We’re already looking to apply the forward-thinking Fish River Station conservation model elsewhere in Australia, again in partnership with the ILC and the Australian Government. This project equips us with another innovative conservation tool that, like the Indigenous Protected Area, formally reunites Indigenous Australians with the lands that sustained their ancestors.

The purchase of Fish River Station has forged an effective new partnership that seeks to maintain the traditional practices that have guided this country’s evolution over thousands of years while embracing current approaches to culture, livelihoods, and conservation.

(First Image: Aerial view of Fish River Station, northern Australia. Image Credit: Tim Bond. Second Image: Gouldian finch Image Credit: Steve Murphy/AWC.

Apparently, you have to capture a double rainbow to get 15 minutes of fame these days. But this is still one gorgeous shot taken by Flickr user Kyle Hammons at Pinnacles Desert in Western Australia’s Nambung National Park. Thanks for sharing it through The Nature Conservancy’s Flickr Group!  

See all The Nature Conservancy’s featured daily nature images—submitted to the Conservancy’s Flickr group by people like you—at my.nature.org.

And get inspired to take your own great nature shots — check out our favorite nature photography features, including amazing slideshows and tips from the pros.

1. According to this account, COP16=win!  Get the skinny on the Cancun Agreements.  (Grist)
2. Chevy Volts are finally hitting the road.  (Scientific American)
3. So, most states’ transportation policies do zero to curb carbon emissions– and some even make them worse, says a new report.  (Green House)
4. If you’re looking for a green job, you might want to consider relocating to Indiana.  (CleanTechnica)
5. A new study says that the American southwest’s existing water systems just aren’t sustainable.  (Wired)

1. A shark sanctuary larger than Denmark has been declared in the Coral Triangle. Yay! (Mongabay)
2. Best way to sleep if you’re a parrotfish? Tucked in to your safe little cocoon….made of mucus. (BBC)
3. Do conservation easements work? A TNC study in Wyoming takes a look. (Conservation Journal Watch)
4. Hikers rejoice: 200 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail have been fixed up, thanks to the federal government. (Greenspace)
5. Is there a silver lining for the desert tortoise as solar power plants invade its territory? (Green)

1. Can the suburbs be as green as cities? An experimental neighborhood gives it a shot. (Grist)
2. Ancient grains of sand discovered in Africa could help researchers understand climate change. (Live Science)
3. At COP 10, the UN sets a goal to cut species extinction in half by 2020. (NYTimes)
4. More education won’t resolve the climate change debate, says Chris Mooney. (Conservation Journal Watch)
5. Halloween is over, now it’s time to compost your pumpkin…find out how. (The Daily Green)

The Conservancy has been in Australia for more than 10 years. In that decade, we’ve made fantastic headway; as an organization, we’ve learned a lot about what it takes to successfully protect Australia’s environment.

Still, Indigenous Australians have about, oh, 4,000 decades on us. It stands to reason, then, that they have a fair amount to teach us.

The Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) — an exciting development that’s giving us a new way to conserve Australia’s rich natural and social legacies — is letting indigenous people do just that.

The IPA has become a hugely attractive model due to the effectiveness with which it can both protect enormous stretches of threatened lands and also provide people with stable, sustainable livelihood opportunities. Indigenous rangers are combining modern science with conservation lessons learned over a 40,000-year relationship with the land.

IPAs are parcels of land owned by Indigenous Australians who have made agreements with the federal government to safeguard the area’s natural resources. In return, indigenous people can gain employment as IPA rangers and are able to live on and manage the land as their ancestors have for thousands of years.

The very first IPAs were established in the late 1990s, and what began as a pilot program has blossomed into an integral part of Australia’s conservation strategy. There are now 38 IPAs across Australia, and they account for over 23 percent of the country’s National Reserve System.

The Conservancy has long been an advocate for indigenous people to manage their own lands. In the past year, we have supported two new IPAs in northern Australia’s Arnhem Land — collectively, these IPAs protect more than five million acres of land. Indigenous rangers in these reserves are protecting vital grasslands, a number of unique plant and animal species and a number of ancient indigenous rock paintings.

Recently, in recognition of our efforts on behalf of the National Reserve System and far-reaching role in Australian conservation, Australia’s national parks authority, Parks Australia, invited the Conservancy to join the IPAs subcommittee of its Indigenous Advisory Committee. I was proud to attend the first meeting last week in Canberra. The two days I spent in the capital were among the most exciting I’ve experienced during my career in conservation, and convinced me of the importance of committing the Conservancy’s full range of resources to the project of expanding and supporting IPAs.

IPAs place the stewardship of Australia back into the hands of the people that have preserved its natural wonders for thousands of years. We’re not just conserving Australia’s most vital landscapes; we’re conserving its people’s way of life.