This presentation will share the process of developing biologically-relevant criteria for habitat enhancement on vineyards, and the potential for application of those criteria to other working landscapes. Conservation in the 20th Century focused on establishing public lands and protected areas that would be managed as a public trust, wherein wildlife and natural resources within designated boundaries would be available in perpetuity for the public to enjoy.

That approach became a global standard, but changing population demographics and land-uses increasingly challenge our ability to steward those resources. A key conservation challenge has been reconciling conflicting goals of working landscapes with a clear need for wildlife habitat connectivity between public land protected areas. Vineyards, and specifically vineyards participating in low-impact certification programs, offer great potential to identify practices that provide real conservation benefit while maintaining profitability. From 2017-2019, the OSU-Cascades HERS (Human and Ecosystem Resilience and Sustainability ) Lab worked with L.I.V.E (Low Input Viticulture and Enology) to identify actions vineyards could undertake to meet sustainable vineyard certification requirements while also providing meaningful conservation benefits.

This collaborative project used the Oregon Conservation Strategy (OCS), a multi-agency strategy designed to protect the state’s most valuable natural assets, as the basis for making strategic recommendations for habitat improvement in vineyards. Actions were incorporated into a checklist vineyard owners can complete on their own, with certification points awarded for individual actions depending on relative benefit to OCS priorities.

A pilot application was completed for vineyards in the Willamette Valley in 2019, with additional pilot testing planned for vineyards in the Columbia Plateau and Klamath Mountains ecoregions in 2020.

Matt is a senior instructor of natural resources and program lead for the sustainability double degree at OSU-Cascades. He teaches courses ranging from endangered species ecology to rangeland ecosystem management, and his scholarly interests include sustainability in brewery and vineyard settings, ecological assessment of urban landscapes, ecological restoration and species adaptation to climate change. Matt received his doctorate from Colorado State University where he studied ecosystem management at the wildland/urban interface, and his M.S. from Utah State University where he studied restoration of degraded sagebrush communities. He created and directs the HERS (Human and Ecosystem Resilience and Sustainability) Lab at Cascades, a trans-disciplinary unit focused on triple-bottom-line approaches to human community development and ecosystem management. Under the HERS umbrella, Matt is working with the National Park Service to develop a park studies unit at OSU-Cascades which will serve as a nexus for research, management recommendations and curricula related to management of U.S. national parks.

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