KSON Forges Ahead with Strategic Conservation

Klamath Bird Observatory was a recipient of one of our 2020 Partnership Grant awards. Over the next several months, we are featuring grant awardees–who the partners are, and what they intend to accomplish.

The Klamath Siskiyou Oak Network (KSON), coordinated by Klamath Bird Observatory, will benefit from Pacific Birds’ 2020 Partnership Grants, along with a dozen other grant recipients. With this award, KSON will be expanding its capacity to conserve oak and prairie habitat in southern Oregon and northern California.

KSON is a regional partnership whose steering and technical committees include Klamath Bird Observatory, Bureau of Land Management, Lomakatsi Restoration Project, Natural Resources Conservation Service, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, Southern Oregon Forest Restoration Collaborative, The Nature Conservancy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program, The Understory Initiative, the  U.S. Forest Service and Pacific Birds. The overall mission of KSON is to conserve oak habitat and oak-associated birds through strategic conservation actions.

This partnership has shown that it gets things done. The group has been building collaboration for oak restoration since 2011, already leveraging over $7.5 million in public and private funding to restore over 6,500 acres. Along with the on-the-ground restoration, shared learning, monitoring, and adaptive management are core to the partnership’s success.

In 2020, the partnership completed their Strategic Conservation Action Plan which will guide the group’s ongoing efforts to conserve oak ecosystems. Their actions will work to enhance the partnership, educate and engage landowners, restore and protect land and otherwise ensure that oak habitats thrive in the Klamath-Siskiyou bioregion and share and coordinate outreach with other regional oak partnerships in the Northwest. To do this, KSON needs to have the core staff capacity to maintain and grow the partnership–something Pacific Birds was able to assist with via the Partnership Grants. We are glad to know that more efforts are underway for birds, other wildlife and the public and private landowners in the area.