Purpose: The Sierra Meadows Partnership (SMP) identified a tool for helping prioritize meadow restoration as among its five highest priorities to achieve the goals of the partnership. The purpose of the Prioritization Committee is to develop a tool that will provide a strategic, flexible approach for prioritizing meadows for restoration and protection in order to maximize project benefits, reach desired meadow conditions as described in the Sierra Meadow Strategy, and increase the efficacy of the SMP.

 

Goal: The prioritization tool will help increase the pace, scale, and, most importantly, the efficacy of meadow restoration and protection by providing a flexible, strategic approach to decision-making that will ensure the projects we pursue achieve multiple benefits and are the best investment of our limited resources. The tool will also help clarify desired meadow conditions to inform restoration design, monitoring, and adaptive management.

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Objectives:

1. Develop a scalable, flexible framework for prioritization that provides a suite of conservation targets, additional data inputs, and relevant scales from which the user can select to tailor decision-making.  

2. Provide a one-stop-shop for SMP members to access, leverage, and integrate existing tools and data sets used in meadow restoration, management planning, and decision-making. 

3. Generate a targeted list of meadows that meet the individual user’s needs that can be used for on-the-ground site assessments and further prioritization efforts on a finer scale.  

4. Provide integration with the UC Davis Meadows Clearinghouse to facilitate project tracking and easy access to monitoring and meadow condition data relevant to ongoing prioritization and planning efforts.

5. Contribute to transparent decision-making for the SMP and justify decisions to funders and others.

6. Facilitate the identification of new critical research questions and data gaps necessary for informed decision-making and that can be used to update the tool as new information becomes available.

 

Deliverables:

• Review existing prioritization and decision support tools.

• Refine conservation targets, indicators, scales, and additional data inputs.

• Integrate workgroup efforts with other committees.

• Develop a conceptual model of the prioritization tool and identify data layers.

• Build prioritization tool.

• Pilot and finalize tool.