GRIFFITH PARK WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT PLAN
At more than 4,000 acres, Griffith Park is one of the largest municipal parks in the U.S. It is also one of the wildest, with rugged, chaparral-cloaked slopes and isolated arroyos rarely visited by the 5 million people living within an hour’s drive of its boundaries. It is also home to large and significant populations of wildlife, including several species of plants and animals otherwise extinct from most of the Los Angeles Basin. Despite its considerable biological value, the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks has no staff ecologist or biologist, managing the park exclusively for human recreation and cultural activities (until 2007, virtually no wildlife surveys had ever been conducted in the park, and only a handful of birders, botanist or other trained naturalists had ever published or even taken notes on its species). This has led to a steady degradation of the park’s natural communities, even as park users and neighbors have become more passionate about preserving their local environment. After a devastating fire swept through 800 acres of the park in May 2007, Cooper Ecological Monitoring, Inc. initiated an effort to document the park’s biodiversity, and to provide recommendations to the City of Los Angeles for future management of its resources. This report represents the first step toward that goal, and establishes a baseline in terms of known threats to wildlife. Its recommendations will help ensure future co-existence between the rich diversity of wildlife species supported by Griffith Park and the thousands of human visitors to the park each year.
Examples of Best Management Practices addressed in this plan include:
MOST EFFECTIVE/LOWEST COST
- Identify a small number of dog-free trails or zones in the mostbiologically- significant areas, and have rangers enforce the leash law
- Refrain from removing dead trees and fallen wood in wildland/natural areas,except where this poses an imminent safety hazard.
- Cease planting new plant material and landscaping in wildland areas away from culturally-significant gardens, except as part of professional habitat restoration
- Allow for “passive restoration” of streams and culverts by reducing use of herbicide/brush clearance (to focus on non-natives), directing native plantings, and removing invasive and non-native species. Note: this does not call for an elimination of herbicide use in the park!
- Avoid new light- and noise-creating features in wild land areas of
- Store garbage away from wild land areas (e.g., move out of upper Ferndell/Western Cyn.).
- Have rangers target major coyote feeding zone (vic. ranger headquarters) by ticketing violators.
- Rotate temporary closures of sections of trails in canyon and other sensitive areas to allow for recovery of local ecosystem (e.g., close 1-2 years each).
LOW COST/HIGHLY EFFECTIVE
- Replace open-top garbage cans with closed-top ones, and replace broken dumpsters.
- Retire trails (especially unauthorized trails) causing damage to sensitive habitat areas using boulders, brush clippings (native only), etc.; develop and post informative signs to educate park staff and users to changes.
CONTINUING CURRENT ACTIVITY
- Continue to support research on wildlife status, including sensitive species presence/absence, wildlife movement corridors and choke-points, impacts of human activity (incl. off-leashdogs).
- Continue to work with local biologists (or hire one on staff) to identify andprotect biological “hotspots” where diversity is high, or where natural community is particularly significant.
- Continue to remove most invasive exotic vegetation, particularly in burn area where soil is most vulnerable to invasion.
- Continue meeting with and working with local groups to educate residents about keeping pets and pet food indoors, securing buildings from invasion by wildlifeand vermin, and reducing the use of rodentcide.
LONG TERM PROJECTS TO CONSIDER
This plan seeks to set a course for conservation practices in the park for many years, and to this end, we want to identify some ambitious projects that would require considerable planning and capital, but which would greatly enhance and preserve the current biological diversity of the park. We suggest erecting split-rail/”wood-crete” fencing around the most sensitive habitat areas, such as streams and native oak groves, taking care not to impair aesthetics. Once this is done, portions of streams could be restored by removing cement, including artificial channels and non-functional check-dams. Particularly with large-scale restoration projects (e.g., Toyon Canyon Landfill, Los Angeles River right-of-ways), we urge the park to use qualified, professional firms with more than five years of native habitat restoration in southern California, and to not rely on volunteer labor or “work days”. We recommend starting to remove non-native, planted trees (incl. eucalyptus, pines) from wild land areas where they are impacting sensitive habitat such as coastal sage scrub; obviously, this would not need to be done in established, culturally-significant gardens (e.g., Dante’s View, Amir’s Garden). Finally, the park’s natural area is literally covered with miles of unused irrigation pipe; this should be eventually removed, since modern fire-fighting systems don’t need this, and they contribute to soil degradation and invasion by non-native species
INTRODUCTION
Because of its large size and its location in southwestern California, Griffith Park supports an exceptionally high diversity of native species; in fact, the “California Floristic Province” was recently identified as one of 34 biodiversity hotspots for conservation worldwide due to its high levels of diversity, endemism, and the degree to which it is threatened (Myers et al. 2000). Still, Griffith Park, though vast, is an island, largely cut off from the rest of the Santa Monica Mountains to the west, and from the Los Angeles River along its eastern boundary. As such, most of its animals and plants are essentially “trapped”, living their entire lives within the park, and, with the exception of a few wildlife species, never dispersing more than a few meters from their natal territories.
The park also has a history of heavily usage by human, who over the years have brought their own vision of nature to the park, planting hundreds of acres of non-native trees, cutting trails through sensitive habitat, and building houses up to the park’s borders. Larger forces also affected the park; the Los Angeles River was transformed from a natural system into a concrete-lined flood-control channel by the 1940s, leaving linear fragments of remnant habitat where the water table was too high; a massive landfill (Toyon Canyon) claimed a major canyon in center of the park during the 1950s, and much of the flat land of the park was converted to golf courses and irrigated picnic areas.
Away from the popular attractions like the Los Angeles Zoo and the Griffith Observatory, the majority of the park’s visitors come to Griffith Park to enjoy to the outdoors, the 50-mile views out to the ocean, and the solitude that only a hike in nature brings. It is this nature that this plan seeks to preserve and protect, by identifying species and natural areas under threat, and suggesting ways to alleviate these threats.
Based on recent surveys, several dozen plants and animals for which we have museum specimen records are believed to be now extinct in the park. These include fragile wildflowers like the Brewer’s redmaids, as well as charismatic birds like the loggerhead shrike. Many others are known from tiny, discrete areas of the park, and may “blink out” without our attention and action. Each local extinction, or extirpation, degrades a bit of the park’s diversity, and it is the duty of the park’s management and the concerned public to ensure that these get a fighting chance to survive.