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After reading through this implementation plan, I am still left
wondering what the specific plan is to measure the success of the
restoration and conservation work that is planned.  There is not a
lot of information about establishing the baseline ecological
characteristics that formulate the proper ecological function and
condition and expectation of the land that will be targeted for
project work.  

Too much restoration work is done without a solid understanding of
what the end goal should look like and what is considered a success
for that piece of land--and I believe if we are using tax payer
dollars to do this important work, there needs to be more
investment in understanding the baseline in order to understand if
the project is indeed a success. There is a lot of work being done
more recently in ecology on the importance of soil and site
characteristics and their influence on vegetation expression and
responses to disturbance, historical ecological understanding of
the land, and how land uses have and do impact sites--however very
little money is being spent on the upfront field work needed that
will provide those soil-site-vegetation relationships and how they
relate back to their disturbance regimes as a baseline predictor
and tool for understanding the goals and objectives of a
restoration project. So much of the work that needs to be done to
understand the implications of climate change relate back to the
soils and vegetation and yet very little actual data exists at the
landscape and site level to back up much of the evaluations and
assessments and models that are used.  If we are to make real head
way in understanding how to address climate change and the impacts
of climate change, we must have a better inventory of what we
already have--even at the base level.  What is the soil profile,
what vegetation typically grow on this type of soil, and how do the
soil and site properties impact vegetation response (composition,
production and structure). There have been previous efforts to
relate soils and vegetation from the early 1970s in California and
I believe an effort like that is warranted again, in order to
gather the essential data for better baseline information to inform
all of the crucial work outlined in this Implementation Plan.
Otherwise, how will we know you have succeeded by 2030?  What is
your baseline for success?  Plant community composition alone is
not enough to evaluate true restoration success (it is only ONE
piece of the soil-forming factors), and comparing apples to apples
by delineating the expected results thru similar soil properties
that result in similar vegetation assemblages and responses to
disturbance would provide a much better tool for restoration and
conservation success.  I strongly encourage you to consider better
soil, site, vegetation inventory as part of this process.  There
are frameworks and groups (both state and federal) capable of doing
this cooperatively across the state if properly motivated by a
group such as this and the Governor.

Thank you for your time.

Kendra Moseley