Restoration, Biodiversity, and Our New Role in 21st Century California Presentation by Dan Gluesenkamp

For over 50 years, our community has worked to save and restore California’s celebrated wild gardens, from Joshua Tree to Point Reyes to our Laguna de Santa Rosa. During those decades, the human population has doubled and biodiversity conservation in California has been dramatically transformed. Against all odds, using a growing diversity of conceptual and technical approaches, we have somehow managed to save most of what makes California special. As we look ahead, we see new threats and wonder how to save California for the future.

Dan Gluesenkamp will speak about places, priorities, and projects, and how new generations of Californians, with new ideas and diverse voices, will leverage the incredible successes of past struggle toward building a future we all can love. Together, we will explore a vision for how we learn and work toward lasting change, transition California to shared systems that secure our treasured biodiversity, and with our success inspire the rest of the world to do the same for their special lands.

Dan Gluesenkamp is Executive Director of CNPS, and was previously E.D. of Calflora and Director of Habitat Protection and Restoration for Audubon Canyon Ranch’s thirty preserves. He earned his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley studying plant-insect interactions in native and invasive thistles, and has led research and restoration projects across California. A co-founder of the California Invasive Plant Council and of the Bay Area Early Detection Network (BAEDN), in 2009, Dan discovered a presumed-extinct Franciscan manzanita (Arctostaphylos franciscana) plant growing on a traffic island at the Golden Gate Bridge.