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Sudden Oak Death has been impacting California’s coastal forests for more than a decade. In that time, and in the absence of a centrally organized and coordinated set of mandatory management actions for this disease in California’s wildlands and open spaces, many local communities have initiated their own management programs. We present five case studies to explore how local-level management has attempted to control this disease. From these case studies, we glean three lessons: connections count, scale matters, and building capacity is crucial. These lessons may help management, research, and education planning for future pest and disease outbreaks.

Successful control of invasive exotic plants depends to a large degree on the regeneration potential of the target exotic species and other species that might also be influenced by the removal effort. In coastal grasslands of California, exotic French broom (Genista monspessulana) forms both dense stands aboveground and abundant seed banks belowground. Land managers attempt to reduce broom cover and the seed bank through prescribed burning, but before this study, no investigators had examined the effect of repeated burning on French broom and associated grassland species. We found that the soil seed bank of stands that were burned had fewer broom seeds than unburned areas but that repeated burning did not reduce the seed bank beyond what was observed after one fire. Fire also did not have any consistent effect on the seed banks of other grassland species. We also examined the relationship between broom stand age and seed bank size but did not find a strong relationship between them. Our data suggested that the broom seed bank stays constant or declines slightly with stand age. We did, however, find that nonbroom seed numbers decreased as broom stands aged. Our results suggest that fire does reduce the size of the broom seed bank and that control of broom need not be limited to only the youngest stands.

Difference-in-differences, Spatial hedonic, Invasive diseases, Sudden oak death,

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