The Vandenberg monkey flower is a tiny, low-to-the ground, bright yellow trumpet of color with spots of orange, and it only grows on the Burton Mesa—that’s 1,000 acres of sandy, hilly, windswept chaparral habitat stitched together between patches of residential development.
Denise Knapp, the director of conservation and research at the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden, counted only 100 plants on the mesa this past spring. For an annual that blooms every year, that’s not very many, she said. Contrast that number with the thousands of lupine and California poppies—also annuals—that grow so thick, they color acres of Santa Barbara County hillsides purple and orange in April and May.
It’s the first year Knapp has researched the rare native plant, which was officially listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act in August. The research she’s doing will look into what threatens the monkey flower, what its pollinators are, and what affects the plant’s annual bloom numbers. She’s also collecting some seeds to freeze through something called the Conservation Seed Program.
“Seeds can keep in the freezer for 100 years or more,” Knapp said, “as kind of an insurance policy against extinction.”
The research Knapp is doing will help put conservation plans into place on the mesa, which will help the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service build a sort of road map with other agencies designed to increase the monkey flower’s population enough for it to be taken off the endangered list.
The arroyo toad—listed in 1994 and has a range from Monterey County to Baja California that includes the Santa Ynez and Santa Maria River basins—has come far enough down that recovery pathway that the Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing to downlist it from endangered to threatened. The process was started in 2012, and the agency will be accepting comments on its latest proposal through Nov. 17.
Jeff Kuyper of Los Padres Forest Watch said he doesn’t believe the arroyo toad has made enough of a recovery to be downlisted.
“It’s reckless to prematurely downlist a species that is still critically imperiled, as we believe the arroyo toad still is,” Kuyper said. “It would receive lesser protections. … Not as much emphasis would be put on it.”
He said the Wildlife Service is supposed to propose these listings based on the best available science, and a lot of the data the agency used in the proposal is a decade old and doesn’t show that the arroyo toad has made enough of a population rebound.
“Just relying on 10-year-old data is troublesome in and of itself,” he said.
The 2- to 3-inch-long, warty species in question is what Della Snyder-Velto, a senior fish and wildlife biologist who is the arroyo toad species lead, called the most specialized of any of the native amphibians in California. It’s what’s known as an indicator species for its environment, sort of a canary in the coal mine for California’s coastal streams and rivers.
Snyder-Velto said in an email that the Los Padres National Forest, which contains portions of the Santa Maria and Santa Ynez river basins’ known arroyo
toad habitat, has taken big steps toward conservation and recovery of the arroyo toad since it was listed.
“The Forest [Service] has conducted intensive surveys over the past 10 years to better understand the distribution of arroyo toads and impacts to the species from forest management,” she said in the email. “The Forest has closed campgrounds, rerouted trails, and closed roads in arroyo toad habitat.”
When the species was listed as endangered in 1994, it was thought that arroyo toad populations had declined by as much as 76 percent due to a loss of habitat to development coupled with habitat modifications—such as dams—as well as non-native predators such as crayfish and bullfrogs, according to a species report released by the Wildlife Service in March 2014. A study conducted by Sam Sweet in the early 1990s, estimated that the toad had occupied 295 miles of stream in California, and that figure had declined to 73.5 miles of stream.
Sweet estimated that the distribution of toads in Los Padres National Forest had been reduced by 40 percent in 70 years.
The Wildlife Service’s species report details observances of the toad since 1992. The last study conducted in the Santa Maria River Basin was in 2007 by Snyder-Velto, who noted that there were adults present. In the Santa Ynez River Basin, the species report notes that Forest Service staff monitored the Upper Santa Ynez River, Mono Creek, and Indian Creek and saw arroyo toads in “most of the last 15 years.”
Current information puts the arroyo toad in 25 river basins in California, whereas in 1992, the toad was only found in 22 river basins.
A press release from the Wildlife Service said “although current threats to the arroyo toad remain similar to when the species was listed, ongoing conservation efforts are reducing some of the effects from these threats.”
Ashley Spratt, a spokesperson with the Ventura Fish and Wildlife Office, said that downlisting a species from endangered to threatened doesn’t mean conservation efforts for it go away. It essentially means that the species is no longer considered at risk of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range, and that there are comprehensive land management plans in place to continue reviving the population of a species.
Those management plans take years of research that are just starting for the Vandenberg monkey flower. Connie Rutherford, the Ventura office’s listing and recovery coordinator for plants, said the Service is working on identifying critical habitat for the flower and figuring out all the threats to its survival.
She said one of the biggest things that’s disturbed the species is obvious when you look at historical maps of Burton Mesa’s landscape.
“And then you look at what’s left of that habitat, there has been loss over the decades to development,” Rutherford said.
Contact Mananging Editor Camillia Lanham at clanham@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Oct 23-30, 2014.