On January 30, 2026, the Santa Cruz Mountains Stewardship Network held the Science & Stewardship Symposium, bringing together more than 250 leaders working on scientific research and hands-on land stewardship in the Santa Cruz Mountains region.
The all-day program featured dozens of presentations and posters by Native Tribes, scientists, land managers, and policy makers. Also featured, were plenary talks by Don Hankins, Jennifer Norris, and David Ackerly.
The Santa Cruz Mountains are part of what is known as the California floristic province, one of 36 recognized biodiversity hotspots in the world due to its high diversity of plants and wildlife including dozens of rare and endemic species found nowhere else on earth. The Symposium brought many of the people who care for the land into the same place, giving them an opportunity to build relationships and share information.
Even if you missed the Symposium, the presentations and posters are now available here.
See below for reflections on the Symposium and what it meant to the land stewardship community.
Building a Network Across Generations
Jorge Ramos
Executive Director, Jasper Ridge Bilogical Preserve (‘Ootchamin ‘Ooyakma)
The day was energetic from the very beginning. It felt like a much-needed event for the people of SCMSN who care about these landscapes. It was timely and full of hope, the kind that inspires action among friends. Having worked mostly in universities and field stations, I have always been a student of the field and of nature, while also focusing on building spaces and opportunities for students to get outdoors and explore future careers. I’ve also long been an advocate for stewardship. Recently, I even found some of my earliest public presentations from more than 15 years ago calling for more stewardship in academia. The symposium reminded me that I’m on the right track in my career, and that there is still so much work to be done but not alone, and not without friends.
I was excited to hear that a core message across all three plenary speakers was a call to action centered on stewardship. It reminded me that stewardship holds multiple timelines, values, careers, challenges, and pathways. Don Hankins’ foundational plenary called on us to practice stewardship across generations. His work, bringing fire back and slowing water, helped me think about our annual wins and the long-term marathon wins needed to rebuild the processes that create older, more resilient partnerships and ecosystems. Jen Norris strongly urged us to step up: to be willing to enter uncomfortable spaces, build science communication skills, and translate our work into real decisions. “Conservation needs us. Biodiversity needs us,” she said. David Ackerly pointed to a shift in our value system under the threats of climate change. We have to accept that there will be losses and transitions. He also underscored the urgency, not just to protect the past, but to come together and choose a future. Together, these talks left me with a stronger sense of shared responsibility, to think beyond our own lifetimes, many generations from now.
It can feel cliché to pull quotes, and I encourage you to re-listen to these talks. I want to be clear, these lines don’t summarize the speakers’ presentations. They are simply the phrases that stood out to me and helped me thread my own takeaway for SCMSN’s next steps:
From Don Hankins: “Active stewardship…it is a connection through a network of generations across.”
From Jen Norris: “Policy and science came together to allow us to do more stewardship in the landscape. We need to step up and be heard.”
From David Ackerly: “Science is a place to play; it takes all of us together to choose a path forward.”
I was also impressed by the Indigenous Knowledge and stewardship presentations that highlighted the power of Indigenous-led stewardship in the Santa Cruz Mountains. At Jasper Ridge ('Ootchamin 'Ooyakma), Bernadette Quiroz and Tadashi Fukami shared early “Two-Eyed Seeing” collaborations between the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe and Stanford. The “two-eyed seeing” activities support intergenerational community building across many fields, fire, botany, and language. Alec Apodaca and Esak Ordoñez described the Amah Mutsun Land Trust’s Integrative Stewardship Model, including collaborative archaeo-botanical research and stewardship in Quiroste Valley and other sites. Much of their work creates hands-on, intergenerational opportunities for young people to grow into their roles as stewards of the land.
As the day shifted to the breakout sessions, I moved to my assignment. As moderator of the Prescribed Fire session, I learned about practical site-preparation and understory burn methods from Spencer Klinefelter, new experimental designs to study prescribed broadcast burns from Ian Cook and Georgia Vasey, and gained new perspectives on smoke, policy, and public health from Arjan Walia. The number of questions—and the follow-up conversations—highlighted both the growing interest and the urgency to continue bringing good fire back through stewardship and science. The session sparked new connections and ideas that can help the SCMSN community plan and implement burns, share best practices, apply adaptive management, and study future prescribed and cultural fire in the region.
The poster session was loud, in a good way, with the kind of energy you get when people who usually work outdoors are suddenly inside, excited to share their science and stewardship practices. With more than 20 posters spanning topics from fire to wildlife, rare plants, carbon, invasive species, and new monitoring tools, presenters showed how stewardship is becoming more integrated with research and more collaborative across organizations. It truly felt like a network at work: universities, agencies, nonprofits, students, practitioners, and researchers sharing methods and results and hopefully, finding new ways to partner on the next generation of stewardship projects.
By the end of the day, the messages I got from the plenaries felt even clearer: we need to keep building stewardship across generations, keep communicating across disciplines and roles, and keep building the data, tools, and partnerships that will help us choose a better future for people and biodiversity.
Science & Stewardship Symposium Impression
Irina Kogan
Vice President of Conservation, Peninsula Open Space Trust
The symposium was a very successful event. Attendance was strong, and the level of engagement was high. Participants asked thoughtful questions, contributed actively, and were clearly immersed in the conversations. There was also a real sense of connection in the room. People seemed to genuinely enjoy the experience, and the event fostered a spirit of camaraderie and shared learning that felt both energizing and hopeful.
One of the most valuable aspects of the symposium was the opportunity to bring researchers and land managers together in a meaningful way. The exchange was genuinely two-way. Researchers shared findings that addressed important and timely scientific questions. Practitioners contributed their perspectives, experience, and on-the-ground observations from the lands they manage. The discussions reflected the inherent complexity of both studying natural processes and managing land. Bringing these groups together created opportunities to learn from one another and address shared management questions collaboratively. It also opened the door to new partnerships—an important outcome in a limited funding environment. These connections ultimately benefit the Santa Cruz Mountains region and lay the groundwork for more coordinated, science-informed stewardship in the years ahead.
Reflections on the Inaugural Science and Stewardship Symposium
Aaron Hébert
Natural Resources Manager, Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority
The inaugural Science and Stewardship Symposium brought together, for the first time I believe, this amazing community of practice based here in the Santa Cruz Mountains—from Native stewards to foresters, from graduate students to open space technicians, from amazing plenary speakers to practitioners sharing their hard-earned local knowledge.
The three things that really stood out to me are:
———
Everyone there was, at most, two or three degrees away from being connected to everyone else
———
there is really nothing like getting to know your neighbors, and
———
how powerful it is to share what the Stewardship Network is so good at.
———
As an organizer of the conference, I had the pleasure of previewing the presentations in three of the sessions. This took a bit more time than a usual conference—emails to get together around the holidays and often an hour or more with each person to talk about their presentation. I imagine for some of the presenters they might have felt annoyed by the need to present twice in some sense. For me, I saw it as an opportunity to make sure the symposium was as good as we could make it for the 250+ attendees and to build another connection within the Stewardship Network. It was not a surprise to me that I knew about half the folks I was working with and it was a pleasure to catchup on their work and to convey that I, as a representative of the Stewardship Network, was here to help. This work of building relationship and connection is literally the work of the Network and, yes, it does take time and can feel secondary to the fire hose of emails and alerts we are inundated by. One of the presenters was abroad until the week just before the conference. I was worried they would be adrift and unprepared unless we met as soon as they got back. But I didn’t have their cellphone. So, I did what any Network member would do: I reached out to someone else at their very large organization I did know. Lo and behold, they were connected. This is what happened during the CZU fire too, with much higher stakes. We called each other because we knew each other. I don’t know about you, but everything I have learned came from other people (and mostly from people in the Network). This event reminded me: the stewards of the Santa Cruz Mountains are all connected and we learn and grow as a community.
Getting to know your neighbors has become an increasingly subversive practice. Do I sound old when I say that too much of our lives are spent responding to digital representations of life and not life itself? Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on seducing us into our phones and into virtual networks to sell our data. We are more alone together than ever before. We are drowning in information and missing communication, connection. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way. That’s why I think some of us love the Network. It’s a humble but radical antidote and, frankly, just fun to be around. How many hugs did I give and receive at the Symposium? It’s rooted in something enduring and important: getting to know people, respecting differences, and coming together where we can benefit each other. As fires, floods, droughts, and politics have challenged our work, as we face so much that we do not control, what path do we have but working together with our neighbors to fight the good fight?
Dylan is often the tone setter. The powerful feelings he brought into the Symposium about what his community in Minnesota is facing signaled to everyone what the event and the Network is about. Dylan was being real about what was on his mind. It also felt very real to hear Network members joyously shout out people’s names in the main session. Jorge! Kirk! The Network culture is marked by good natured ribbing and celebratory call outs, like we are a high school soccer team after a victory over our rivals and not the bunch of nerds we really are. The Network is also a place to get serious about common issues and sharing knowledge.
The Symposium presentations really highlighted the depth of knowledge, passion, and expertise in the community. Remote sensing. Isotypes as indicators. Fisheries. Forests. Wetlands. Nitrogen. Prairies. Fire. Collaboration. I worried before the Symposium: would it feel like a Network event with 250+ people? Would this widening of our space to emphasize academia effect the vibe? Are data, formulas, and statistics a vibe? I think the Symposium succeeded on that front. Our embrace grew just a bit bigger and I’m hopeful the academic attendees (not to mention the many staff from Network orgs) thought, wow, these people are cool/interesting and really care about the work I’m doing. It’s been a long time since I was in academia and it was great to be back at school, challenged by Dr. Ackerly to think about the fate of our beloved redwoods in a warming climate, to think and see differently by Dr. Hankins (Miwkoʔ), Bernadete Quiroz from the Muwekma Ohlone, and Esak Ordonez from the Amah Mutsun, and to hear from Dr. Norris that how we talk about our work really matters.
I hope this dialogue between science, stewardship, and traditional ecological knowledge continues to grow, so that we remember we are connected, that we know our neighbors, and that we remember the power we have together in our little corner of the biosphere.